Bureaucratic Politicization, Partisan Attachments, and the Limits of Public Agency Legitimacy: The Venezuelan Armed Forces under Chavismo

Abstract

Which factors determine support for the armed forces? What is the effect of agency politicization on confidence? Existing studies, which draw largely from bureaucratically neutral militaries, find that interpersonal trust and demographic variables play significant roles in determining public confidence in the armed forces. I argue that this is different for a politicized agency. A loss of bureaucratic neutrality activates voters’ partisan attachments, inducing individuals to judge the agency on the basis of their ties to the governing party or leader. Using survey data from Venezuela, I show that government evaluation has a salient and bifurcated effect on respondents’ perceptions of their armed forces. Respondents sympathetic to the governing leader are more likely to have a favorable view of the military while those identifying as opposition are more likely to have a negative view. The results suggest that politicization of public agencies may impose an upper limit on public support regardless of institutional performance, undermine their representativeness and legitimacy, and weaken their mandates.

Understanding support for tough‐on‐crime policies in Latin America: The cases of Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras

“…Victim of crime in the last 12 months is a dummy variable coded yes and no , while the variable measuring one's fear of being a homicide victim is coded one for “A lot of fear,” two for “Some fear,” three for “Little fear,” and four for “No fear at all.” Moreover, ideology is coded one for left and ten for right . I did not recode the ideology variable, which is consistent with other scholars in the discipline (Polga‐Hecimovich, 2019), since coding the variables left and right misses people who are in the ideological center. Finally, trust in the national police is from one, “Not at all,” to seven, which represents “A lot.” I controlled for trust in the police as a proxy variable for trust in government institutions .…”

“…It was suggested that I place four in this first grouping and run the model both ways, but it is important to note that there is not a theoretical or empirical foundation for where to code four on a 7‐point scale. Scholars discuss the advantages and disadvantages of collapsing variables (Murad et al, 2003; Pohlman & Leitner, 2003).…”

Coup with Adjectives: Conceptual Stretching or Innovation in Comparative Research?

“…However, their use has mushroomed in recent decades, particularly in Latin America. We found evidence of the recent invention or adaptation of qualifiers such as "soft" (Pitts et al, 2016), "parliamentary" (Santos and Guarneri, 2016), "presidential" or "democratic" (Varol, 2017), "constitutional" (Helmke, 2017;Yarwood, 2016), "market" or "neo-liberal" (Mauceri, 1995), "electoral" (Hellinger, 2005), "slowmotion" (Polga Hecimovich et al, 2017), "civil society" (Encarnación, 2002), and "judicial" (Yavuz and Koç, 2016). Many of these terms are piled together in Gentili's (2016) volume on the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil.…”

The crisis in Venezuela: Drivers, transitions, and pathways

“…This line of argument also stresses some structural features, such as dependence on oil revenues as an explanation (Buxton 2019) rather than policy decisions and transformations undergone during the Bolivarian Revolution led first by Hugo Chávez and later by Nicolás Maduro. On the other hand, institutionalist and liberal scholars see the crisis mainly as a result of the deterioration of governance mechanisms that have undermined checks and balances, the independence of institutions and ultimately turned the country unto an autocracy (Polga-Hecimovich 2019;López Maya 2016).…”