Venezuelan democracy in transition: Problematizing the Chavez Period

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi, Siyaset Bilimi ve Kamu Yönetimi Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2015

Öğrenci: DENİZ PELİN DİNÇER

Danışman: CANAN ASLAN AKMAN

Özet:

In this thesis, the democratic transformation in Venezuela during the President Chávez period (1999 – 2013) is analyzed by adopting a middle-range democracy approach which brings socio-economic equality and social rights back into the quality of democracy analysis. The study identified a paradox of the democratic transition in Venezuela in this period which arose from, on the one hand, the tension between the weakening horizontal and vertical accountability mechanisms and, on the other hand, improvements on socio-economic rights and expanded political participation. It is argued here that procedural democracy approaches remain insufficient to assess the impact of the recent transformations on the quality of Venezuelan democracy. During the Chávez period the socio-economic equality and social rights of Venezuelans improved substantially and President Chávez’s new participatory democracy model integrated the hitherto excluded sectors of the population. However in the same period erosion in the institutions of horizontal accountability have significantly constrained the potential of this progress in the socio-economic equality for a genuine political inclusion or empowerment for the masses, which ultimately weakened the democratic quality in Venezuela during the Chávez period.