7 Venezuela: Corruption in a Petrostate

Gates, Leslie C.

doi:10.1515/9781685855345-008

Cited by 2 publications

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“…This occurred in Argentina as Presidents in the early 2000s up through 2015 changed the makeup of the supreme court to serve their own respective interests (Blake and Kohen, 2010). Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 2004 acted in a similar manner, increasing the number of Supreme Court Justices to pack the court with his allies, effectively eroding the judiciary as a key source of accountability (Gates, 2010). Mih alyi and Szel enyi (2016) also found that in developed democratic societies, institutions were often created for the purpose of rentssuggesting that we should not only be weary of captor actors taking control of institutions of accountability as David-Barrett (2021) suggests, but we should also consider who and how such institutions were created and for what purpose.…”

Section: Literature Review 31 State Capturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the 20 th century up until the 1980s, Latin American countries continued down the path of corruption, which was often grand in nature. Gates (2010) notes that in the case of Venezuela, corruption was often facilitated by the strong role of the state. Consequently, politicians used the state for their own personal gain often siphoning off resources from state-owned enterprises such as the Venezuelan state-owned oil company PDVSA.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Consequently, the economic inequalities that resulted from the increased corruption pushed some countries to the political extremes, such as Venezuela and Bolivia. Both countries elected populist politicians, respectively, in 1998 and 2006, each of which came to power promising to rid corruption in their respective countries (Gates, 2010;Gingerich, 2010). As corruption and state capture, along with the economic inequalities they fomented, continued to plague the region, citizens continued to elect populists who promised to fight against corruption, such as Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil (Hunter and Power, 2019) and Nayib Bukele of El Salvador (Mel endez-S anchez, 2021).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Assessing the impact of wealth inequality on state capture in Latin America

Korman

2023

IJDI

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Purpose This study aims to analyze the effects of economic inequalities on state capture in Latin America. Economic inequalities are the defining issues of our time. While the effect of economic inequality has been explored before on its impact on state capture in Latin America, it has often been done in a qualitative manner. Moreover, most quantitative research to date uses poor proxy variables to assess the impact of inequalities on corruption and or state capture, such as the Gini coefficient, which suffers from a lot of missing data. Design/methodology/approach A random effects regression model is used to enable the exploitation of between level variation to greater generalize the results across the Latin American region while minimizing bias to the coefficient estimates. Findings The results demonstrate that the top 1% wealth inequality is highly statistically significant and positive in explaining the variation in state capture. The greater the share of wealth the 1% hold, the more state capture we should expect. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper presents the first empirical study using a novel variable, the top 1% share wealth inequality derived from the World Inequality Database that directly measures the top 1%’s share of wealth overall. The study examines the empirical effect of the top 1%’s share of wealth inequality in contributing to state capture. Nineteen Latin American countries are analyzed across the temporal period 1996–2021.

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Section: Literature Review 31 State Capturementioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Assessing the impact of wealth inequality on state capture in Latin America

Korman

2023

IJDI

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Interest groups in Venezuela: lessons from the failure of a ‘Model Democracy’ and the rise of a Bolivarian democracy

Gates

2012

Journal of Public Affairs

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This article uses the Venezuelan case to shed light on the potential role of interest‐group systems in discrediting liberal democracies and to identify challenges that the region's democracies are likely to confront in constructing effective and fair interest‐group systems. It first analyzes the role Venezuela's interest groups played in discrediting its 40‐year two‐party democracy. It argues that the discrediting of a system heralded by many as the region's ‘model democracy’ cannot be understood by merely assessing how the structure of the group system excluded certain groups. The study shows that the inclusion of certain business interests in visible positions of power also helped discredit the two‐party democracy. The article then compares the above system with the new group system which has emerged since 1998 as part of a new democratic system inspired by Latin America's 19th century Liberator, Simón Bolívar. This comparison reveals that the current system inverts the former system of inclusion and exclusion, even as it has retained a number of the old system's less virtuous features. The implications of the Venezuelan case for the region's democracies are elaborated in the conclusion. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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7 Venezuela: Corruption in a Petrostate

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Assessing the impact of wealth inequality on state capture in Latin America

Assessing the impact of wealth inequality on state capture in Latin America

Interest groups in Venezuela: lessons from the failure of a ‘Model Democracy’ and the rise of a Bolivarian democracy

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