This book began with a series of three interrelated questions about Chavismo: How can we categorize the movement? What are its causes? And what are its unique consequences for Venezuelan politics? The answers all rely on the concept of populism as discourse or worldview. Chavismo is a populist movement, and it has been since Chávez first came to prominence after the failed 1992 coup. The peculiar Manichaean outlook of Chavismo has been relatively constant since at least 1994 and easily predates (and partially explains) the movement's turn to the left in recent years. Understanding the discourse of Chavismo gives us crucial clues to its origins, helping us find these not so much in the decades of economic stagnation that preceded the election of Chávez in 1998 as in the systematic violation of the rule of law that worsened during the oil boom of the 1970s under the protective shelter of Punto Fijo democracy. The unique imprint of the movement's worldview is seen in peculiar organizational features, such as the fact that Chavismo is organized as a polarizing movement. And it is manifested in significant economic policies such as the Missions, which embody the government's leftist brand of populism and include a series of partisan features that contradict a purely office-maximizing strategy.

Seeing populism in terms of ideas does more than help us understand Chavismo, however. It forces us to reconsider our understanding of populism and ultimately helps us spell out the logic that undergirds other successful populist movements.

In order to test for interaction effects between the indicators of sympathy with Chávez's populist discourse and indicators of the other, traditional explanations for the party system breakdown, I ran several new versions of Model 2 from Table 4.5 (the model using Informal rather than Education and Class). Specifically, I interacted Honest, Fight Corruption, and Constitutional Reform separately with (1) each of the retrospective economic evaluations (sociotropic and pocketbook), (2) Informal, and (3) Promote Decentralization, Guarantee Human Rights, and Protect Environment. Because all of these but the retrospective economic evaluations are dummy variables, I created the interaction measure by simply multiplying the two components; hence, a 1 indicates that both effects are present, while a 0 indicates that one or both of them are not. In the case of the retrospective economic evaluations, the resulting scale instead goes from 0 to 3, similar to that of the original economic indicator. In keeping with best practice, I include both the interaction term and the component indicators (Brambor, Clark, and Golder 2006).

Table C.1 presents results from just one of these estimations, using Fight Corruption × Pocketbook Retrospective as the interaction effect.

On 3 June 2004, Venezuela's National Electoral Commission (Consejo Nacional Electoral, or CNE) announced that a recall election would be held against President Hugo Chávez in August.

The announcement marked a significant victory for the opposition after years of tumultuous, polarizing conflict. Earlier, in April 2002, a violent clash between opposition demonstrators and government supporters in Caracas precipitated a military coup that removed Chávez from power for 36 hours. Subsequent efforts at reconciliation failed, and for two months the opposition led a devastating national strike that paralyzed the oil industry and much of the private sector. Finally, in May 2003, after negotiations sponsored by the Organization of American States (OAS), representatives of the government and the opposition signed an agreement committing both sides to a legal, nonviolent solution and opening the way for the presidential recall.

The recall process formally began with a signature drive by the opposition from 28 November to 1 December 2003. The effort generated an overwhelming response in favor of the recall, with 3.4 million signatures collected, well beyond the 2.5 million required by the constitution. The process nearly stalled after the CNE took five months to verify the signatures and then, in a controversial decision, found irregularities in over 900,000 of them.

In order to further check the robustness of our sampling technique, I had my assistants score large, randomly selected sets of speeches by two Latin American presidents, Lula and Cárdenas. Collecting larger samples for all of the chief executives would have been too expensive. I selected these presidents because their discourse would be more difficult to measure (both were perceived as only mildly populist, somewhere between 0 and 1), thereby presenting us with a harder test, and because my assistants and I were reasonably certain that we had the entire universe of their speeches. We randomly selected one speech from each month of their respective terms in office, 42 speeches for Lula and 60 for Cárdenas.

Because of the large numbers of speeches, I asked the graders to dispense with any note-taking or other written analysis other than a short set of comments and a grade; thus, this was also a test of a more truly holistic grading technique than we used in the previous two phases of the study, when I asked graders to compile notes on each of the elements of populist discourse. This new grading technique was much faster (typically requiring 15 minutes per speech instead of 30–45 minutes). Two native Portuguese speakers and two native Spanish speakers conducted the grading, taking about four weeks to complete the task.

This book was born out of the last stages of my dissertation research nearly 10 years ago. I first traveled to Venezuela in 1999 to study why the traditional system of political parties had broken down. For several months I interviewed former party leaders and scholars of traditional Venezuelan politics, a process that gradually educated me in the history and workings of the old Punto Fijo system. However, as I worked, it became clear that something new and important was taking shape in Venezuela, something that very few academics were studying yet. This was the movement led by Hugo Chávez, or “Chavismo,” which was taking the place of the old party system.

Seeing Chavismo as the real story was my first step in a process of discovery; the second step came when I began to understand the distinct qualities of Chavismo as a populist movement. My academic training is in the “new institutionalism,” meaning that I study the causes and consequences of formal rules and political organization, particularly political parties, using rational-choice theory. Hence, when my first interviews of Chavista leaders took place in December 1999, I focused on the leadership of what was then the movement's official party, Movimiento V República or MVR. My attempts to analyze Chavismo were essentially descriptions of MVR's organization and ideology. However, in early 2003, a colleague invited me to present a conference paper discussing Chavismo as an example of populism.