The Presidential and Parliamentary Elections of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela: Change and Continuity (1998–2000)

The paper examines to what extent electoral behaviour in Venezuela, as it appeared in the elections of 1998 and 2000, is different from that observed between 1958 and 1988. The paper reaches the conclusion that given the decline in party identification (dealignment), the short-term variables specific to each election, in particular the attitude towards government performance and personalities, have grown in weight vis-à-vis the structural factors (party identification, institutions, long-standing political predispositions). However, the latter were still relevant and important in the 1998 and 2000 elections and it is very likely they will carry on as such for the future. It is also concluded that, even though the party system has become unstable due to the decline in identification with the traditional government parties, new stabilising factors seem to have appeared and should be taken into account. These are ideology and negative party identification.     

The All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries and French Intellectuals, 1925–29

The 1920s and 1930s were years of active personal support for the USSR by a number of eminent French intellectuals who assisted in the creation of an image of the USSR in French public opinion. This was largely based on their perceptions of the social, political and cultural achievements in Soviet society. Analysis of the archival, and mainly unpublished, documents of VOKS (the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries) illustrate the true nature of an organisation that claimed to have been created in order to promote international cultural relations. The internal correspondence and reports reveal the mechanisms used by VOKS from its inception in order to create, foster, and manipulate relations with numerous members of the French intelligentsia. Also revealed in this paper is the leading role played by VOKS in the creation of the USSR-France "cultural" friendship societies, its policies concerning the selection and treatment of French visitors, and other features of political propaganda that have been commonly considered to belong to the period of the 1930s.     

‘There Can Be No Revolution without Culture’: Reading and Writing in the Bolivarian Revolution

Under Hugo Chávez's ‘Bolivarian Revolution’, the government made itself present in all stages of literary production, applying the official idea of reading and writing as ‘socialist practices’. The Bolivarian government envisaged a popular counter‐hegemony, courting popular support while delegitimising cultural elites and reinforcing class tensions. Bolivarian cultural policy is anachronistic in an age of global literary markets, while the emphasis on a national collective of writers over internationally promoted representative writers of the revolution is particularly radical.     

Bringing the Revolution to the Countryside: Rural Health Programmes as State‐Building in Post‐1952 Bolivia

Bolivia's Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, MNR) took power in April 1952 via a popular social revolution. After 1952, the party implemented state‐sponsored modernisation projects, including extending rural public health programmes. The MNR used health programmes to change rural practices, cultivate political loyalty, and expand the state's political power. Yet rural indigenous communities were hardly passive recipients of these programmes. These communities often requested government services, and they borrowed the MNR's own political rhetoric to position themselves as worthy of state attention. Public health programmes increased access to rural health care, but they also allowed state officials and rural communities to negotiate the MNR's authority.     

From dictatorship to democracy: the US and regime change in Paraguay, 1954–1994

Abstract— This paper seeks to analyse the external sources of democratisation in Paraguay, specifically how the US contributed to regime change in that country. In the small and vulnerable countries of Latin America, like in Central America, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Paraguay, where the US played a portentous role in the rise, consolidation and demise of authoritarian regimes during the Cold War, Washington has also rendered a vital, but often neglected role, in protecting and enhancing democratic rule. This paper also provides an analysis of the different forms of leverage exercised by the US before and during Paraguay's transition.