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Overview
This book does not pretend to be a general survey of Venezuelan politics. Rather, it is an attempt to understand, for both theoretical and practical purposes, the development of shared "rules of the game" for political action in a heterogeneous society. Once these norms are accepted by key elites, and then imposed on recalcitrant oppositions, they provide a means of controlling and managing political conflict without eliminating it.
Mr. Levine's conclusions are based primarily on case studies of specific political conflicts. His study of conflicts over educational reform uncovers the conditions in which a traditional sector of society—Catholic groups and institutions—moved from violent, total opposition to the political system to a position of accommodation. In the second case study he examines the role of students in politics, with special reference to the integration of students in national patterns of conflict and opposition.
Originally published in 1973.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691619200 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1416 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 300 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
Conflict and Political Change in Venezuela
By Daniel H. Levine
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1973 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07547-1
CHAPTER 1
The Problem
Venezuela presents a continuing paradox to the political scientist. With only three years of civilian rule in the first half of this century, it has built since 1958 one of the few effective, competitive, democratic political orders in Latin America. Hidden with conflict, civil violence, and systematic guerrilla warfare since the early 1960's, it has nevertheless managed three peaceful transfers of power in recent years (1958, 1963, and 1968). These were the first consecutive transfers of power through mass popular elections in the nation's modern history, and the 1968 elections marked the first time power had ever been handed over to an opposition party — with a plurality of barely 30,000 votes out of almost 4 million ballots cast. It has one of the longest and bloodiest histories of military dictatorship in Latin America, and yet has spawned a powerful, highly organized, and far-reaching system of mass political parties — a system with few parallels in the entire region.
Some analyses of Venezuelan politics have taken a narrow focus, considering planning on a national or regional level, the evolution of political parties, politics in the urban slums, or the development of key leadership generations. Others have taken a global view, arguing that the polity is marked by a profound "cultural heterogeneity," which reinforces deep social and political cleavages, hinders the formulation and implementation of rational social policy, and saps the strength and vitality of the system.
This book grew out of a general concern with problems of conflict, conflict resolution, and the development of institutions for routine conciliation of disputes. Although the work was initially inspired by the idea of cultural heterogeneity as a key to the understanding of political conflict, that approach was abandoned as inadequate to explain the Venezuelan experience. Instead, I try to answer two broad questions: (1) why has the Venezuelan political system changed the way it has; and (2) given deep and often cumulative cleavages (both organizational and ideological in origin), how has the society learned to manage conflict, building an effective political system in a relatively free, pluralistic, and democratic social order?
My concern, therefore, is with how conflicts are managed, and not with the "dysfunctionality" of conflict, or with the degree to which it inhibits rational policy formation. The book examines a crucial transition in the life of a political system: the development of representative democratic regimes in a country lacking strong democratic roots or traditions. These facts are approached in several ways. In terms of the political system as a whole, I analyze the evolution of modern mass political organizations, the changing structure and content of social and political conflict, and the gradual development of common norms governing political behavior. My central concern is the development of political legitimacy in Venezuela — legitimacy in the sense of shared norms as to criteria of power (ballots or bullets, to use a crude example), proper methods of political action, and proper arenas for political action. The learning of norms is central to recent Venezuelan experience — norms governing behavior in conflict situations, norms governing the use of organizations, and norms concerning resources and arenas appropriate to political action. It is important to note that these interests do not specify or require any general substantive consensus in the society. Rather, I will describe and explain the process by which commonly accepted "rules of the game" were developed, shared among key elites, and imposed (by force if necessary) on recalcitrant oppositions, no matter what their ideological coloring.
My conclusions about the political system as a whole are based primarily on several case studies in political conflict. In books of this kind, case studies provide valuable perspectives on the actual behavior associated with general system change. Overall commitments to "democracy," "development," "conciliation," and the like, are all too often merely fine phrases, rhetoric which collapses under the strain of actual conflict. Case studies let us see the development of new norms and patterns of action in conflict situations and provide valuable historical perspective on changes in the structure of issues, the use of social and political organizations, and the attitudes to conflict and opposition characteristic of contending groups.
The use of case studies, selected on a theoretical basis, allows us to look at behavior in institutionally defined situations. In this way, it is possible to see what form ideal public norms take in concrete social settings. In such contexts, constraints on action are present which may not exist in the world of public formulas. Indeed, as we shall see, people may compartmentalize their worlds so that effective patterns of action continue in paths seemingly incongruous with publicly expressed values and attitudes. Particular institutional definitions of roles and role expectations may create pressures which move action away from ideal goals. Given my concern with questions of motivation and perception, I relied heavily on interviewing. In all, 105 interviews were carried out with 89 respondents. Subjects were chosen in five major areas: (1) leaders of the Church and Catholic associations; (2) leaders in secular education (the parties, teachers' associations, and the Ministry of Education); (3) university professors and authorities; (4) student leaders and party youth leaders; (5) high officials of the PCV and ex-high officials of the MIR. The interviews were unstructured, lasting from one to three hours, and designed to find out about behavior in conflict situations, perceptions of the opposition, and norms concerning the resources, methods, and goals appropriate to political conflict.
There are two primary case studies. First, the evolution of Catholic-secular relations is studied in the context of conflicts over educational reform. Of particular interest here are changes in the structure of issues; the impact of past severe conflict in leading all sides to seek accommodation and avoid future conflicts; changes in the organizational base of the Catholic sector; and the changing perceptions on both sides of conflict and opposition as social processes (e.g., are they normal, legitimate, or aberrant?). My basic concern is to explain the conditions under which a traditional sector of the society (Catholic groups and institutions) moved from violent, all-out opposition to the political system to a position of accommodation and acceptance of new norms of organization and action. The overall consequences of the accommodation of Catholic and lay sectors are also of interest, especially insofar as the bargain struck between these sectors was made at the expense of others — in this case, the parties of the extreme Left, who grew increasingly alienated from the system.
The second case study examines the role of students in politics, with special reference to the integration of students into national patterns of conflict and opposition. In the burgeoning literature on students and politics, relatively little attention has been paid to students as political actors — their resources, organizations, and relations with other social forces. Primary emphasis here is given to the role assigned to students by the different political parries, and to the structural ties binding students and student organizations into national patterns of conflict and opposition. The key norms in question are those concerning the use of organizations — the proper relationship between conflicts at different levels, or concretely, students and national political parties.
At this point, it may be worthwhile to outline the content of the new norms and patterns of behavior which came to dominate Venezuelan politics after 1958. Basically, Venezuelan politics can be described as a party system. The basic vehicles of political action are parties, the fundamental legitimate political resource is mass consent and votes, and power is transferred through elections. A crucial norm in Venezuelan politics is organizational concentration: the parties are monopolists of political action. The concentration of forms of action reflects a conscious desire to avoid situations where conflict gets out of hand, to maintain (through party organization) a high degree of control over the consequences of action. Opposition and conflict are tolerated, and indeed, built into the system, but opposition is constrained to work within a set of common procedures and forms. Politics is supposed to work through elections, the congress, elected officials, and the like — through explicitly political mechanisms. Forms of action which are difficult to control (such as mass street demonstrations) are discouraged and often suppressed.
The emphasis on concentrating political action in a few common organizational vehicles reveals a conscious decision to avoid what Huntington has called a praetorian society:
In a praetorian system social forces confront each other nakedly; no political institution, no corps of professional political leaders are recognized or accepted as the legitimate intermediaries to moderate group conflict. Equally important, no agreement exists among the groups as to the legitimate and authoritative methods for resolving conflicts.
As we shall see, political elites in many sectors are concerned with the dangers of praetorianism for Venezuela. Hence, a common line of analysis in the case studies is the relation of political parties to sectoral organizations and changes in the salience of any particular group as opposed to the parties per se in political organization and conflict. The role of political parties in mediating and moderating conflict is given special emphasis, and seen as a relatively independent set of variables, creating autonomous pressures and constraints.
Articulating a concern for the way in which Venezuela's political institutions manage conflict has a particular, specific meaning. Although this chapter is not intended to present or justify any detailed conceptual or theoretical framework, it may be useful to describe one fundamental concept now. As used here, the scope of conflict means the degree to which any conflict joins actors in various functional spheres and arenas. The more spheres or arenas joined on a single line of conflict, the greater the scope. The scope of conflict has "objective" and "subjective" dimensions. The objective scope refers to the degree to which the organizations involved in a conflict cut across a variety of social spheres, linking any member's actions in one arena to his actions in all others. In this way, conflicts in different arenas are joined through common organizational affiliations of the participants. For example, the actions of students in university politics follow the lines of national politics because the students' behavior is governed by the political party to which they belong — both in their general role as citizens and their more specialized role as students. The subjective scope of conflict refers to the way in which the issues, as perceived, structure the commitments of the actors to the conflict.
Let me define the concept of scope with a negative example. Isolation of conflict implies that relations in one arena do not determine relations in all others. The evolution of industrial conflict in this century in the United States and Great Britain offers a good example of the institutional isolation of conflict:
In terms of its issues, industrial conflict increasingly becomes industrial conflict without reference to general social and political problems. Secondly, this narrowing down of the issues of industrial conflict means that the individual worker is concerned with them only in his role as worker. In other roles, he is moved by other things; as consumer or citizen, he is no longer worker.
If conflicts are not isolated, and ever-greater numbers of arenas are fused on unified lines of conflict, then we have polarization. The continuum from isolation to polarization is central to this investigation, for conflict management hinges on the ability to isolate a given dispute and resolve it in limited terms. Not every conflict need involve more general questions of political structure and legitimacy. Ability to isolate conflict, however, requires prior agreement on questions of political legitimacy, as defined above. A major premise of this book is that as long as legitimacy questions remain unresolved, conflicts will be pervasive and difficult to isolate. When legitimacy questions are at stake, and the form and proper procedures of political institutions are in question, conflict runs rapidly up the hierarchy of arenas until institutions themselves are involved. Legitimacy conflicts, in short, take priority.
Unanswered Questions
This book is strongly influenced by theories of pluralism. The perspective offered on pluralism, however, is different from the one which has dominated most recent research and writing, and it may be well to set out these differences at the outset. My goal is not principally to decipher "who has the power," or "who governs." It lies, rather, one step back, in identifying the conditions of different patterns of conflict and conciliation. I am not so much concerned with who wins, as with why the players act as they do — why and how criteria of legitimate power, methods of action, and basic attitudes to conflict and opposition change. Who has the power remains, of course, a central concern of political analysis. But the answer to that question — whatever it may be — is insufficient in itself to explain the scope of conflict in a society, and less so to explain goals pursued, levels of intensity and violence, and the choice of different arenas for conflict.
All these are as important to political understanding as mapping the distribution of power. The study of conflict, focused sharply on the evolution of common procedural norms, offers important insights on the emergence and survival of competitive political systems. These are perspectives drawn from group interaction and its characteristics, not from the analysis of relative strength and power alone.
This book is not a general descriptive survey of Venezuelan politics, nor does it pretend to be. The case studies were selected to illustrate dimensions of conflict that have theoretical relevance. They hang together theoretically, if at all. Thus, not all important groups are studied; not all salient issues or problems receive detailed attention. The conclusions and generalizations advanced are based on the case studies, related research of my own, and a critical reading of the existing literature on Venezuela.
Initially, my design emphasized a close analysis of micro-situations of conflict, with great attention to the personal qualities of participants. A rigid and violent conflict was taken as a sign of rigid and violence oriented personalities, closed to contact and communication with others. This approach proved unsatisfactory, consistently leading to pure tautologies or useless propositions. Many blind alleys were explored in the first stages of research. As work progressed, it became clear that the patterns of conflict and conciliation so visible in Venezuelan pontics could not be explained in terms of individual psychological characteristics, but rather through analysis of the priorities and organizational structures of groups, which together defined the scope of conflict and provided a concrete basis for interaction. Continuing to focus on personal characteristics implies an unjustified identification of the characteristics of individuals with the traits of social and political systems. Keeping in mind the distinction of these two levels of analysis, it becomes clear that a person can act in a conflict so as to increase its overall rigidity and violence, while remaining personally a friendly and open individual. Personality traits are, of course, not irrelevant — they are simply not necessary or sufficient to explain the conflicts.
A closer and more reflective look at the data further emphasized the impossibility of analyzing any conflict apart from broader trends in the political system, and from the participants' own perceptions of these trends. These considerations dictated closer attention to the ties binding actors in any given conflict to issues and conflicts in other arenas. Analysis and explanation thus moved from the case studies as such, back to the structure and formulation of issues and to the organizations tying different arenas and levels of action together — the modern, mass political parties that pervade every aspect of Venezuelan political life.
A candid recognition of these changes in perspective led me to abandon earlier plans for an orienting theoretical chapter — an analytical framework of the now conventional land. The final scheme of analysis, and the propositions and generalizations advanced, are less a format than a product of the analysis itself. I have therefore placed all theoretical syntheses, generalizations, and comparative analyses, in the concluding chapters. In this way, the range of generalization intended, the degree to which any of the propositions advanced is meant to have limited or more general applicability, will be clearer than if theoretical conclusions were presented as a tight analytical framework.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Conflict and Political Change in Venezuela by Daniel H. Levine. Copyright © 1973 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- TABLES, pg. ix
- FIGURES, pg. x
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. xi
- CHAPTER 1. The Problem, pg. 1
- CHAPTER 2. The Setting, pg. 14
- CHAPTER 3. The Party System: Conflict, Conciliation, and Exclusion, pg. 27
- CHAPTER 4. Catholics and Seculars: Toward Polarization, pg. 62
- CHAPTER 5. Catholics and Seculars: Toward the Isolation of Conflict, pg. 94
- CHAPTER 6. Students and Conflict, pg. 145
- CHAPTER 7. Students and Conflict: The Role of Political Parties, pg. 177
- CHAPTER 8. Conflict, Organization, and Change, pg. 209
- CHAPTER 9. Conflict and Consensus: Operative Norms, pg. 231
- CHAPTER 10. Conclusions: The Future of Conflict, pg. 255
- GLOSSARY, pg. 261
- SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 267
- INDEX, pg. 279