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ABSTRACT
With Venezuela's Chavista political movement battling to keep its grassroots participatory experiments alive amid a cataclysmic economic depression, we have a new crucial case for assessing the evolution and continuation of participatory institutions under left-wing populist governments. Based on original recent survey data, we marshal evidence to show that the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela's (PSUV) use of grassroots participation to defend the Maduro regime has weakened the quality of community-level participation, just as it may have lengthened the life-span of Chavismo's most important and expansive participatory institution, the Communal Councils-the main phenomenon we document here. The continuation of the Councils, despite a massive economic contraction, defies expectations that the groups would disappear when conditions became considerably less favorable than during the economic boom that existed during their 2006-2008 launch. It also raises crucial questions about the power politics dimensions of grassroots-level mobilization, an aspect of participatory democracy that scholars have too often neglected.
INTRODUCTION
The future of Chavismo, the left-wing political movement in Venezuela created by populist former President Hugo Chávez, has never been more uncertain. The movement's current leader is the embattled President Nicolás Maduro, an experienced but unimaginative politician who has clung to power for six years. A former congressman, foreign minister, and Vice President, Maduro became interim President after the then-cancer-stricken Chávez named him his successor in December 2013. It bears underscoring that Maduro owes his Chavista movement legitimacy to this personal appointment by Chávez, a figure whose legacy between that between 40-50 percent of Venezuelans consider positive, according to poll data from 2017 and 2018.1
To be sure, Maduro cannot draw on any democratic or economic sources of legitimacy. Maduro has used fraudulent electoral processes and executive power grabs to block the opposition's Constitutional proposals for democratic change while relying on repression to persecute regime opponents. This turn toward hard authoritarian rule sped up amid a cataclysmic economic crisis. As a result of Maduro's failed leadership (with some recent help from U.S. economic sanctions), Venezuela's gross domestic product contracted by over 50 percent from 2015 to 2018, and the World Bank estimated a 25-percent contraction for 2019.2
As Maduro led the country into an economic abyss and worked to turn the political system into a dictatorship, Venezuela's...