An Empty Revolution

On December 2, when Venezuelans delivered President Hugo Chávez his first electoral defeat in nine years, most analysts were taken by surprise. According to o⁄cial results, 50.7 percent of voters rejected Chávez’s proposed constitutional reform, which would have expanded executive power, gotten rid of presidential term limits, and paved the way for the construction of a “socialist” economy. It was a major reversal for a president who just a year earlier had won a second six-year term with 62.8 percent of the vote, and commentators scrambled to piece together an explanation. They pointed to idiosyncratic factors, such as the birth of a new student movement and the defection of powerful groups from Chávez’s coalition. But few went so far as to challenge the conventional wisdom about how Chávez has managed to stay in power for so long. Although opinions diaer on whether Chávez’s rule should be characterized as authoritarian or democratic, just about everyone appears to agree that, in contrast to his predecessors, Chávez has made the welfare of the Venezuelan poor his top priority. His government, the thinking goes, has provided subsidized food to lowincome families, redistributed land and wealth, and poured money from Venezuela’s booming oil industry into health and education programs. It should not be surprising, then, that in a country where