Venezuela: The Life and Times of the Party System - Political ...

Prospects for the Future
Political parties and the system built around them (the party system, in our terms) have
contributed mightily to the creation and survival of democracy in Venezuela. The plus side of the
political ledger is long, and the parties deserve credit for what they have accomplished. Mass
publics have been incorporated into politics; high rates of participation have been combined with
enduring stability; debilitating ideological polarization has been set aside; and threats of
overthrow, insurrection, atomization, vote dispersion, and political fragmentation have all been
overcome. Success in these efforts has been due, above all, to the combination of strong party
organization, effective leadership, and an evolving democratic political culture. To be sure, past
success is no guarantee of present or future virtue. Politics everywhere asks ‘what have you
done for me lately?’ and even accounting for the force of memory, it is therefore appropriate, in
conclusion, to consider not only what the parties have achieved, but also the dilemmas and
challenges now emerging for the future. For the Venezuelan party system to survive and the
democracy it has built to consolidate and prosper in the future, avoiding another sad February in
Venezuela, three challenges must be addressed: coping with economic scarcity, accommodating
demands for new channels of participation, and controlling the military.
Throughout most of its modern history, an expanding economy and overflowing treasury
have given Venezuela’s leaders room to maneuver often denied to their colleagues elsewhere in
the hemisphere. Governments could count on ever-increasing income, with no need to take from
anyone in order to increase the overall pie. Income taxes were essentially unknown. But the
economic crisis (drop in oil prices, devaluation, inflation, and a large fiscal deficit) of the 1980s
has raised questions about the ability of this system to operate in such different circumstances.
Without abundant resources to distribute, the role of the state will have to shift, from dominant
player to one actor among many. Thus far, efforts to reorient the role of the state and the pattern
of public policy begun under the second government of Carlos Andrés Perez in 1989 have had
mixed results. At the very least it is clear that interelite pacts buttressed by organizational
mechanisms to channel and control discontent can no longer be relied upon.
Accommodating new channels for citizen participation and in this way ‘democratizing
democracy’ has been central to the reform programs under way for over a decade. It is important
to realize that pressure for reform has roots that extend well beyond institutional engineering and
the details of altered electoral systems. One way to grasp these pressures is to see them as the
results of democracy itself. Pressures for reform of the parties and the party system gain strength
from an organized civil society that simply did not exist when the party system took on its current
form. The characteristics of Venezuelan political parties noted in this chapter—centralization,