The confrontational ‘us and them’ dynamics of polarised politics in Venezuela: a post-structuralist examination

This thesis explains how the tension between the articulations of liberal representative democracy and radical participatory democracy have put into motion a process that has resulted in a pernicious polarisation in Venezuela. It achieves this, through a poststructuralist examination of discursive formations historically and between 2001-2017 around political participation and the dynamic of contestation between these two socio-political groups. Jenifer McCoy’s term ‘pernicious polarisation’ is used here to differentiate what happens in Venezuela from the silenced ever-present polarisation between the ‘governed’ and those ‘governing’. To investigate this polarisation the thesis integrates a critical perspective inflected by Foucault’s concept of governmentaliy and Laclau and Mouffe’s conceptualisation of hegemony. The purpose is to provide a sound explanation able to recognise the limits of discursive formations of liberal representative democracy and radical participatory democracy, and the ways in which political transformation is delimited and channelled by co-option or incorporation into the dynamic of state institutions, and the logic of government. The thesis makes three conceptual contributions to the debates on democratisation in Latin America and democratic political conflicts. The first concerns the nature of polarisation, which is demonstrated to involve a logic of antagonism on which hegemony relies. It demonstrates that polarisation was enabled by the use of hegemonic logics by both groups and the formation of an antagonistic subjectivity. The second contribution regards an analytical distinction of those involved in the polarisation. Whereas the opposition is grouped in its desire to remove Chavismo from government, there are two Chavismos: those in the government and the popular sectors. The result of this distinction is a bipolar hegemony: the phenomenon of competing populism, which curtails the political transformation desired by the popular sectors. The third conceptual contribution concerns, the function of polarisation. The thesis demonstrates that the strategic creation of narratives of enemy/friend can be seen as a technology of power, or a strategic instrument of government which dismantles possibilities of political transformation, normalizing a general understanding/practice of politics around a logic/rationality of ‘us not them’. In the explanation of the pernicious polarisation, this thesis has challenged the dominant narrative of Venezuelan political conflict by demonstrating that by no means polarisation is the result of one particular side or the unattended result of struggles for political transformation. Rather it is demonstrated that polarisation is due to a dynamic that involves the reproduction of hegemonic forms of representation in politics, which is premised or facilitates the logic of antagonism and its normalization.