Continuity and change in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

Abstract

The aims and outcomes of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela are fiercely contested. A sympathetic view sees the possibility of Left revolutionary transformation as destabilised by aggressive US and domestic opposition actions. Detractors trace an authoritarian path from President Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998 to an inevitable socialist implosion under his successor Nicolás Maduro two decades later. This article emphasises continuities between the Bolivarian Fifth Republic and the Fourth Republic that the Revolution displaced. These account for the limitations of the transformative process. Historical institutionalism explains the reproduction of rentier practices and centralised state management and political organisation, culminating in cascading crisis across regime types.