Download or read book The Unraveling of Representative Democracy in Venezuela written by Jennifer L. McCoy and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2006-03 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For four decades, Venezuela prided itself for having one of the most stable representative democracies in Latin America. Then, in 1992, Hugo Chávez Frías attempted an unsuccessful military coup. Six years later, he was elected president. Once in power, Chávez redrafted the 1961 constitution, dissolved the Congress, dismissed judges, and marginalized rival political parties. In a bid to create direct democracy, other Latin American democracies watched with mixed reactions: if representative democracy could break down so quickly in Venezuela, it could easily happen in countries with less-established traditions. On the other hand, would Chávez create a new form of democracy to redress the plight of the marginalized poor? In this volume of essays, leading scholars from Venezuela and the United States ask why representative democracy in Venezuela unraveled so swiftly and whether it can be restored. Its thirteen chapters examine the crisis in three periods: the unraveling of Punto Fijo democracy; Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution; and the course of "participatory democracy" under Chávez. The contributors analyze such factors as the vulnerability of Venezuelan democracy before Chávez; the role of political parties, organized labor, the urban poor, the military, and businessmen; and the impact of public and economic policy. This timely volume offers important lessons for comparative regime change within hybrid democracies. Contributors: Damarys Canache, Florida State University; Rafael de la Cruz, Inter-American Development Bank; José Antonio Gil, Yepes Datanalisis; Richard S. Hillman, St. John Fisher College; Janet Kelly, Graduate Institute of Business, Caracas; José E. Molina, University of Zulia; Mosés Naím, Foreign Policy; Nelson Ortiz, Caracas Stock Exchange; Pedro A. Palma, Graduate Institute of Business, Caracas; Carlos A. Romero and Luis Salamanca, Central University of Venezuela; Harold Trinkunas, Naval Postgraduate School.
Download or read book Dragon in the Tropics written by Javier Corrales and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since he was first elected in 1999, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frías has reshaped a frail but nonetheless pluralistic democracy into a semi-authoritarian regime—an outcome achieved with spectacularly high oil income and widespread electoral support. This eye-opening book illuminates one of the most sweeping and unexpected political transformations in contemporary Latin America. Based on more than fifteen years' experience in researching and writing about Venezuela, Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold have crafted a comprehensive account of how the Chávez regime has revamped the nation, with a particular focus on its political transformation. Throughout, they take issue with conventional explanations. First, they argue persuasively that liberal democracy as an institution was not to blame for the rise of chavismo. Second, they assert that the nation's economic ailments were not caused by neoliberalism. Instead they blame other factors, including a dependence on oil, which caused macroeconomic volatility; political party fragmentation, which triggered infighting; government mismanagement of the banking crisis, which led to more centralization of power; and the Asian crisis of 1997, which devastated Venezuela's economy at the same time that Chávez ran for president. It is perhaps on the role of oil that the authors take greatest issue with prevailing opinion. They do not dispute that dependence on oil can generate political and economic distortions—the "resource curse" or "paradox of plenty" arguments—but they counter that oil alone fails to explain Chávez's rise. Instead they single out a weak framework of checks and balances that allowed the executive branch to extract oil rents and distribute them to the populace. The real culprit behind Chávez's success, they write, was the asymmetry of political power.
Download or read book The Private Roots of Public Action written by Nancy Burns and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why, after several generations of suffrage and a revival of the women's movement in the late 1960s, do women continue to be less politically active than men? Why are they less likely to seek public office or join political organizations? The Private Roots of Public Action is the most comprehensive study of this puzzle of unequal participation. The authors develop new methods to trace gender differences in political activity to the nonpolitical institutions of everyday life--the family, school, workplace, nonpolitical voluntary association, and church. Different experiences with these institutions produce differences in the resources, skills, and political orientations that facilitate participation--with a cumulative advantage for men. In addition, part of the solution to the puzzle of unequal participation lies in politics itself: where women hold visible public office, women citizens are more politically interested and active. The model that explains gender differences in participation is sufficiently general to apply to participatory disparities among other groups--among the young, the middle-aged, and the elderly or among Latinos, African-Americans and Anglo-Whites.
Download or read book Extractive Imperialism in the Americas written by James Petras and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-07-24 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent changes in the global economy, which include a growing demand for energy and natural resources such as industrial minerals and agro-food products, have brought about a massive devastating pillage of resources in the developing world by multinational corporations as well as states with energy and food security concerns—and concerns about a system (global capitalism) in the throes of a global crisis. These developments have also brought about a major change in the form taken by imperialism (actions taken by the state to advance the interests of the dominant capitalist class). This book explores the changing face of US imperialism in the regional context of the Americas, a major stage in the unfolding drama of a system in crisis.
Download or read book Channeling the State written by Naomi Schiller and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-12 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Venezuela's most prominent community television station, Catia TVe, was launched in 2000 by activists from the barrios of Caracas. Run on the principle that state resources should serve as a weapon of the poor to advance revolutionary social change, the station covered everything from Hugo Chávez’s speeches to barrio residents' complaints about bureaucratic mismanagement. In Channeling the State, Naomi Schiller explores how and why Catia TVe's founders embraced alliances with Venezuelan state officials and institutions. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research among the station's participants, Schiller shows how community television production created unique openings for Caracas's urban poor to embrace the state as a collective process with transformative potential. Rather than an unchangeable entity built for the exercise of elite power, the state emerges in Schiller's analysis as an uneven, variable process and a contentious terrain where institutions are continuously made and remade. In Venezuela under Chávez, media activists from poor communities did not assert their autonomy from the state but rather forged ties with the middle class to question whose state they were constructing and who it represented.
Download or read book Regression of Democracy written by Gero Erdmann and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-21 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democratization since the implosion of the communist bloc displays a mixed balance. While the neo-democracies in Central Eastern European Countries can be seen as largely consolidated, many other processes of democratization in other parts of the world such as Africa, Asia and Latin America got stuck as unconsolidated or became defective democracies, some ‘regressed’ into hybrid regimes or were even turned into autocracies. While transitology dealt with the transition from authoritarian rule, the reverse process, the transition from democratic rule, remained almost completely outside the scholarly attention. This special issue will address the problems of the regression of democracy and aims at closing the gap between research on democracy and democratization on one side and the emergence of authoritarian regimes on the other. The contributions of this volume analyse the different phenomena in which decline of democracy fans out: the loss of quality, which means a silent regression; the backslide into hybrid regimes (hybridization); and the breakdown of democracy.
Download or read book Teenage Citizens written by Constance A. Flanagan and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-14 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Too young to vote or pay taxes, teenagers are off the radar of political scientists. Yet civic identities form during adolescence and are rooted in experiences as members of families, schools, and community organizations. Flanagan helps us understand how young people come to envisage civic engagement, and how their political identities take form.
Download or read book Politics of Nature written by Bruno Latour and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology—transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: “Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks.” Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society—and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced. In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a “commonsense” division—which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of “mononaturalism” and “multiculturalism,” Latour develops the idea of “multinaturalism,” a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by “diplomats” who are flexible and open to experimentation.
Download or read book Political Attitudes in Venezuela written by Enrique A. Baloyra and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-06-23 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is a benchmark study of voter attitudes in a Latin American country. This volume is based on extensive survey research conducted during the Venezuelan elections of 1973. The methods employed by Baloyra and Martz to poll an "unpollable" society successfully challenge previously established paradigms. The authors interviewed a representative sample of over 1,500 voters to determine relationships between class, status, community, context, religion, ideology, and partisanship on the one hand and political attitudes and preferences on the other. They found that the Venezuelan electorate is defined by a series of contradictory tendencies, and they place their conclusions in the context of contemporary political science literature regarding class and party, ideology and party, and inequality and participation.
Download or read book What s Fair written by Jennifer L. Hochschild and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a long questionnaire and in-depth interviews, Hochschild examines the ideals and contemporary practices of Americans on the subject of distributive justice, and discovers neither the rich nor the nonrich support the downward redistribution of wealth.
Download or read book Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America written by Eduardo Silva and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-31 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eduardo Silva offers the first comprehensive comparative study of anti-free market movements in Latin America and a resulting shift in governmental intervention in the economy and society.
Download or read book The Rise of Nationalism in Venezuela written by Jonathan Eastwood and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eastwood offers a novel account of the rise of nationalism in Venezuela and the broader Hispanic world. Beginning with analysis of the origins of Spanish nationalism in the eighteenth century, he examines the character of social life in Venezuela during the colonial period, showing there was no national consciousness there for the bulk of this period and sketching those characteristics of colonial Caracas that made its elite so receptive to nationalism by 1810. He analyzes the process by which this elite turned to nationalism, considers the various competing nationalisms of the early nineteenth century, and argues that, among other things, the nationalism that emerged in this region was notable for its civic and collectivistic character--qualities, he contends, that contributed to strains of authoritarian politics in later Venezuelan political life. Drawing on political and social theory--notably Weberian historical sociology--and historical scholarship, Eastwood tracks the intellectual shifts and changes pertaining to ideas of nationhood that were the precondition for a specific Venezuelan version of nationalism. His study reveals much about Venezuelan national history, the nature of nationalism, and the roots of authoritarian and democratic government in contemporary Venezuela.
Download or read book The Case Against Socialism written by Rand Paul and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A recent poll showed 43% of Americans think more socialism would be a good thing. What do these people not know? Socialism has killed millions, but it’s now the ideology du jour on American college campuses and among many leftists. Reintroduced by leaders such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the ideology manifests itself in starry-eyed calls for free-spending policies like Medicare-for-all and student loan forgiveness. In The Case Against Socialism, Rand Paul outlines the history of socialism, from Stalin’s gulags to the current famine in Venezuela. He tackles common misconceptions about the “utopia” of socialist Europe. As it turns out, Scandinavian countries love capitalism as much as Americans, and have, for decades, been cutting back on the things Bernie loves the most. Socialism’s return is only possible because many Americans have forgotten the true dangers of the twentieth-century’s deadliest ideology. Paul reveals the devastating truth: for every college student sporting a Che Guevara T-shirt, there’s a Venezuelan child dying of starvation. Desperate refugees flee communist Cuba to escape oppressive censorship, rationed food and squalid hospitals, not “free” healthcare. Socialist dictatorships like the People’s Republic of China crush freedom of speech and run massive surveillance states while masquerading as enlightened modern nations. Far from providing economic freedom, socialist governments enslave their citizens. They offer illusory promises of safety and equality while restricting personal liberty, tightening state power, sapping human enterprise and making citizens dependent on the dole. If socialism takes hold in America, it will imperil the fate of the world’s freest nation, unleashing a plague of oppressive government control. The Case Against Socialism is a timely response to that threat and a call to action against the forces menacing American liberty.
Download or read book Venezuelan Politics in the Ch vez Era written by Steve Ellner and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The radical alteration of the political landscape in Venezuela following the electoral triumph of the controversial Hugo Chavez calls for a fresh look at the country s institutions and policies. In response, this title offers a revisionist view of Venezuela's recent political history and a fresh appraisal of the Chavez administration.
Download or read book Rethinking Venezuelan Politics written by Steve Ellner and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a fresh look at Venezuelan politics, emphasizing the central significance of the country's economic and social cleavages. This work explores the rise of Chavismo, opposition within the country and abroad, internal tensions in the Chavista movement, and the trajectory of the Hugo Chavez government domestically and on the international stage.
Download or read book Dissertations and Theses on Venezuelan Topics 1900 1985 written by and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No descriptive material is available for this title.
Download or read book Popular Dictatorships written by Aleksandar Matovski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-25 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Electoral autocracies – regimes that adopt democratic institutions but subvert them to rule as dictatorships – have become the most widespread, resilient and malignant non-democracies today. They have consistently ruled over a third of the countries in the world, including geopolitically significant states like Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan. Challenging conventional wisdom, Popular Dictators shows that the success of electoral authoritarianism is not due to these regimes' superior capacity to repress, bribe, brainwash and manipulate their societies into submission, but is actually a product of their genuine popular appeal in countries experiencing deep political, economic and security crises. Promising efficient, strong-armed rule tempered by popular accountability, elected strongmen attract mass support in societies traumatized by turmoil, dysfunction and injustice, allowing them to rule through the ballot box. Popular Dictators argues that this crisis legitimation strategy makes electoral authoritarianism the most significant threat to global peace and democracy.
