Populism and neopopulism in the Bolivarian Revolution

This work has as its fundamental objective to verify if in the Bolivarian Revolution there are present theoretical elements of what political science scholars call populism, and more recently neopopulism. In this sense, a methodology was used through a descriptive research through the use of primary sources, from authors such as Weyland (2003), Koeneke (2003), Conniff (2003), Vilas (2003), Arenas (2005), Laclau (2005), Ugalde and Gonzalez (2007), Freidenberg (2007), Panizza (2009), Hawkins (2010), Sanchez (2010) and De la Torre (2010). The findings demonstrate the existence of features of both political categories: predominance of political personalism, friend enemy confrontation discourse, the redistributive character, the concentration of state power, the destruction or uselessness of productive sources and the cancellation of the market as the main actor in the allocation of resources, the return to an entrepreneurial state, and a predominance of ideological discourse on good economic policy measures aimed at evading poverty and solving various social inequities. All this framed in a political model of "Socialism of the XXI Century". A key feature of neopopulism is the emergence of an emerging outsider leader, without ties or dependence on traditional parties, such as the case of the late President Hugo Chavez Frias.