An Autocrat’s Tool Backfires in Venezuela
It is common for autocrats to hold elections. As I’ve written before, winning an election can allow an autocratic leader to claim a popular mandate and to demonstrate to the military and to the political elite that the government’s hold on power is strong enough to make loyalty their safest bet.
If autocrats agree to hold elections, it is usually because they think they are going to win, according to Gretchen Helmke, a political scientist at Rochester University in New York who studies democracy in the Americas. “Or at least come very close to winning so that tilting the outcome in their favor is not seen as so egregious,” she added.
Holding elections is therefore typically not a risk to autocratic power but a means of trying to legitimize and strengthen it. These leaders usually use the tools of state to manipulate and control the election in ways that are “upstream” of the actual vote, such as arresting opposition leaders, barring opposition candidates from the ballot and cracking down on the media.
But sometimes that playbook fails. Even stage-managed contests can produce surprises, delivering a win for the opposition instead of a ratification of the incumbent’s power. When that happens, elections can go from being an autocrat’s tool to an autocrat’s nightmare.
The Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, for instance, expected a 1988 plebiscite to grant him a new mandate, but instead it proved his undoing, ousting him from office and ushering in a return to democracy.
It is still very unclear what the election results will mean for the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, who has proved adept at hanging onto power. He claimed victory in Sunday’s election after the government-controlled electoral body declared him the winner.
But exit polls and the opposition’s tabulation of paper tallies from 81 percent of the country’s voting machines suggest that the opposition candidate, Edmundo González, actually won by a landslide. (The Times has not been able to verify that data independently, but my colleagues from the Upshot wrote a helpful analysis of why there is reason to believe that González won a substantial majority.)
And the government has refused to release any paper tallies, further undermining confidence in its claimed result.
Protests erupted around the country. At least 16 people have been killed and 750 people have been detained by the security forces. Colombia and Brazil, two of Venezuela’s most important allies, have distanced themselves somewhat from Maduro, calling on him to release the full paper tallies of the election results. On Thursday the United States recognized González as the winner of the election, though it is not clear how that might affect Maduro’s grip on power.
Still, analysts say, there have been no defections in the military, and Maduro has held power for years even though he has at times faced intense international pressure to step down.
Not what the “autocrat’s handbook” recommends
Overt, day-of-election manipulation carries high political costs domestically and abroad.
“If you go to consult the autocrat’s handbook, there’s a whole chapter on what not to do in stealing elections,” joked Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist who studies democratic backsliding in Latin America and elsewhere. Last-minute interference with voting tallies would certainly be in it. The Venezuelan authorities “practically wrote that chapter,” having successfully manipulated previous elections, which makes the extent of the apparent last-minute fraud in this one “stunning,” he said.
One possibility is that Maduro underinvested in upstream manipulation because he (or the government) actually believed that they would win and that the polls were wrong, said Dorothy Kronick, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Venezuela’s opinion polls had long suggested that the opposition was extremely popular, but its candidates have consistently underperformed relative to their polling in the past, according to a recent analysis by Francisco Rodríguez, an economist at the University of Denver.
Given that, Kronick said, “I don’t think it was delusional for Maduro to expect that, given all his capacity for pre-election manipulation, he would actually get more votes on Sunday.”
Sometimes, electoral surprises can stem from one of the biggest problems autocrats face: getting accurate information. Members of the government’s inner circle are often reluctant to convey bad news or inconvenient data, making it difficult for leaders to know the true scale of the risks they face.
What could happen next?
The biggest question is whether the vote might ultimately force Maduro to step down. He has, after all, held onto power even amid broad domestic discontent and despite the exodus of millions of Venezuelans who have essentially given up living in their home country under his rule.
This is not even the first time the United States has recognized an opposition figure as Venezuela’s legitimate leader. In 2019, the Trump administration recognized Juan Guaidó, then the head of Venezuela’s legislature, as the country’s president after Guaidó cited a section of the Venezuelan Constitution to claim the mantle of leadership.
Dozens of countries supported the move, but in the end the momentum behind Guaidó faded. Last year he fled to the United States and Maduro emerged stronger than ever.
But there are cases where unexpected election results usher in genuine improvements to democracy. (I still think that this should be called “democratic forwardsliding” because it reverses democratic backsliding, but thus far that term has failed to catch on.)
Guatemala has followed that path this year, for example, as did Ukraine in 2004. Neither case produced an immediate return to full democracy, but in both countries, opposition leaders were able to take office, despite incumbent efforts to keep them out. And in the 1980s, elections brought an end to military dictatorships in Argentina and Chile.
But it doesn’t always work that way. In Russia in 2011, protests broke out over alleged fraud in the legislative elections, but the result was a severe crackdown on dissent and political opposition that continues to this day and that ultimately hardened Vladimir Putin’s hold on power.
Venezuela’s future will probably depend on whether other elites in the government, and particularly its military, remain loyal to Maduro. “So far, the opposition has done an incredible job coordinating and unifying, but it is not clear that there are any actors in the government — within Maduro’s inner circle, within the military, or within the judiciary — who have sufficient incentives to break off from Maduro,” Helmke said.
The lack of even low-level defections or mutinies within the military, Levitsky said, was notable: “It is extraordinary, if it stands, the degree to which the security forces have remained with the government.”
That points to a larger problem, Helmke said. “The more lawless the regime becomes, the harder it is to get underlings to strategically defect. It’s really hard to make any predictions at this point, but the stakes for all Venezuelans could not be higher.”
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