Dorothy Kronick in FiveThirtyEight:
One year after the death of former president Hugo Chávez, these six weeks of protest reveal a country still profoundly split over Chávez’s political project. On one side are those protesting his successor, Nicolás Maduro, who narrowly won last year’s presidential election; on the other are government supporters who see no viable alternative to Chavismo. Asking, “If not this, then what?” Venezuelans cannot find a common answer.
They disagree over a political vision for their country in part because they measure Chavismo against two different benchmarks: Chavistas compare the present to Venezuela’s pre-Chávez past, while the opposition contrasts the current economic situation with more recent developments in the rest of Latin America.
Many government supporters measure life under Bolivarian socialism — as Chávez called his political program — against life under Chávez’s immediate predecessors. Mismanagement of Venezuela’s 1970s oil boom and of the ensuing collapse made the 1980s and 1990s one long economic nightmare. Severe deprivations led to riots, multiple coup attempts and, eventually, to the election of Chávez, then a political outsider. Relative to the foregoing disaster, Venezuelans did fare well under Bolivarian socialism: Incomes grew and poverty declined.
More here. Over at Jacobin, Mark Weisbrot responds:
The thesis of the article is strange. Correctly noting that the political polarization in Venezuela is overwhelmingly along class lines, with the upper-income groups tending to support the protests and lower-income Venezuelans supporting the government, she asks rhetorically, “Why the divide?” and answers:
They disagree over a political vision for their country in part because they measure Chavismo against two different benchmarks: Chavistas compare the present to Venezuela’s pre-Chávez past, while the opposition contrasts the current economic situation with more recent developments in the rest of Latin America.
I think what she means to say is that Chavismo looks better as compared with Venezuela’s pre-Chávez era than it does compared with the rest of Latin America. The first part is a no-brainer: per capita GDP actually fell by more than fifteen percent in the twenty years prior to Chávez (1978-98). However, there is no evidence that the two sides are making any such different comparisons. Do voters anywhere in the world judge their government based on a comparison to its peers? If that were the case in the US, for example, President Obama’s approval ratings would be very high and the Democrats would be sailing to a landslide victory in November’s congressional elections because the relevant income-level comparison for the US is Europe, which has done vastly worse in the recovery from the Great Recession since 2009.
More here.