2022 Volume 2022 Issue 207 Pages 207_17-207_32
Determinants of the changing size of support for the Chávez administration in Venezuela is an important research subject, especially because it has an implication on the theme as to how much, and how, world capitalism determines the politics in Latin American countries. The two simplified versions of the thesis of world capitalism’s ruling power, which is plausible given that the region has had regionwide wave-like political changes, point to its determination of Latin American countries’ macroeconomic conditions and of their economic policies. Although existing studies tend to attribute the changing size of support for Chávez to macroeconomic performance and redistributive policies, they generally do not distinguish them explicitly, much less they compare them.
This paper attempts to compare them, using survey data analysis methods. With a critical review of the literature on economic voting, which predominantly has shown that retrospective “sociotropic” economic voting is the rule, I argue that these findings might be misleading and that the effects of redistributive policies should be systematically integrated into the framework of economic voting studies. I present a working hypothesis that there are those cases in whose analyses the variables of prospective pocketbook evaluation of the low-income population can show the effects of redistributive policies and that Venezuela in the Chávez era is one of these cases. An important assumption is that the combined effects of macroeconomic performance and redistributive policies, which, in turn, are highly conflicting sometimes, are crucial for the low-income population in the developing countries like Latin American ones. Comparing the determining power of the aforementioned variables with other variables, with these considerations in mind, using the data of the Latin American Popular Opinion Project (LAPOP) survey conducted in 2010, the period which I consider crucial for this essay’s theme, I preliminarily tackle with the research subject mentioned above.
A tentative conclusion is that both macroeconomic conditions and redistributive policies played a substantial part, with an implication that, although world capitalism is very important as a constraint in Latin America, each country’s political forces have choices. Methodologically, this paper tentatively shows that standard economic-voting analysis methods, under some conditions, might verify the effects of redistributive policies on voting behavior. A theoretical implication of this paper is that a certain reconsideration of the standard economic-voting framework might be in order.
