Democratic Stability in Venezuela: Elite Consensus or Class Compromise?
对比精英框架与阶级妥协模型，分析委内瑞拉1958年后的民主稳定，并与巴西、智利比较，认为民主稳定取决于国家管理者平衡资本积累与消费政策的能力。
An elite framework is often used to explain democratic stability in post-1958 Venezuela. I argue that a class-compromise model is more useful, not onlyfor understanding the Venezuelan case but also for explaining the variation in regime outcomes across regions of the capitalist world economy and within the periphery. To contrast the utility of the two models, I analyze Venezuela's political history since 1945. To demonstrate the more general usefulness of the class-compromise model, I compare Venezuela to two countries in which democratic regimes were destabilized-Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973. Democratic stability occurs when state managers are able to balance capital accumulation and consumption policies. Democratic instability occurs when state managers lack sufficient resources to satisfy the consumption demands of a mobilized working class without threatening the accumulation interests of capitalists.