Abstract
Civil society emerged as a self-conscious force in Venezuela in the context of extended political and institutional decay. The term itself was rarely heard in national life before the 1980s, as the country’s powerful political parties monopolized all kinds of organization, incorporating and subordinating them to party networks. As the political party system and the institutions built around it entered a terminal decline, great hopes were placed in civil society as a potential source for reconstructing politics on more open and democratic grounds—democratizing the country’s democracy that was widely perceived to be in crisis. These hopes have been frustrated and the energies that moved them have not found enduring form. The combination of high hopes for empowerment and a new kind of politics with frustration and disempowerment unites Venezuelan experience with much of the rest of Latin America in an unhappy pattern.
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© 2006 Richard Feinberg, Carlos H. Waisman, and Leon Zamosc
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Levine, D.H. (2006). Civil Society and Political Decay in Venezuela. In: Feinberg, R., Waisman, C.H., Zamosc, L. (eds) Civil Society and Democracy in Latin America. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983244_8
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