Radical Change at the Ballot Box: Causes and Consequences of Electoral Behavior in Venezuela's 2000 Elections

This study aims to explain the victory of Hugo Chávez and his party in the 2000 Venezuelan elections, to analyze the factors that made this victory possible, and to examine the consequences for future developments in the Venezuelan political system. The decay of traditional party loyalties without the emergence of new parties deeply rooted in society (dealignment without realignment); underdevelopment; and an institutional setting dominated by a president elected by a plurality electoral system have opened the door to personality-centered politics and weak parties, which are the main features of the current political situation. Compared to the 1993 and 1998 elections, the 2000 elections once again confirm an increase in personality politics and the decay of parties as instruments for articulating interests, representation, and governance. As a consequence, this article argues, instability is likely to remain a feature of Venezuela’s party system for some time. The national elections in the year 2000 gave Venezuela the opportunity to ratify or reverse the choice of radical change taken in 1998. A majority of voters chose to confirm the government of Hugo Chávez. This article attempts to explain why, and to assess the political meaning of that decision. The analysis is made from the perspective of electoral behavior theory and previous explanations of political attitudes in Venezuela. Electoral behavior analysis has moved from the search for a dominant single factor to the search for multicausal explanations that accommodate the factors stressed by various historical approaches: social cleavage voting (the sociological approach), party identification (the psychological approach), and government evaluation and issue preferences (the rational choice approach) (Dalton 2002, 145–214; Dalton and Wattenberg 1993; Miller and Niemi 2002). The search for a multicausal explanation appears clearly in Dalton’s work. According to Dalton (2002), in advanced industrial democracies, modernization has brought forth a sizable sector of politically interested, highly sophisticated, independent voters; and this has meant an important decrease in the influence of social cleavages and party identification in the voting decision. Because of this process, which Dalton calls