Châavez Frâias, Hugo

The media has a significant influence on any political process. In Venezuela, particularly, the media plays an important rold in defining the electorate's political opinion and attitude toward the political process. This thesis analyzed how the media's preference for conflict and individual personalities exacerbated overall societal tensions and polarization in Venezuela since 1999. I suggest a framework for a future content analysis of news coverage of the 2012 presidential election in order to quantify and qualify the evolution of bias and balance in Venezuela's mass media.

This project examines the role of political learning in predicting the recent rise of left-of-center governments in Latin America, ranging from moderate center-left coalition governments to one-party populist regimes. Studies of populism consistently point to the role of natural resources and economic crises in predicting the rise of populist regimes. This study adds the concept of political learning by using measures of moderation in the current regime as a dependent variable and measures of oppression in earlier regimes as independent variables. Utilizing case studies of Venezuela and Chile as ideal types and plotting ten further cases on indicators of repression, military spending, corporate tax rates, government spending, the percent of votes going to moderates, and economic freedom scores from Freedom House, I argue that the likelihood of the rise of populist regimes is greater in countries that have not experienced the sort of intense political repression that generates political learning.

Despite the fact that when surveyed 92.4% of the Venezuelan population self identified as Catholic, a large swath of Venezuelans stand Pentecostalized. Pentecostalization in Venezuela seems to take the form of growth in the Catholic Charismatic Movement. The study shows Châvez gained a majority of those whose self identified affiliation is evangelical as well as a majority of those who hold Pentecostal beliefs. The relationship between religion and voting patterns in the 1998 Venezuelan Presidential case has not been explored. The study does this, concluding that although Venezuela is by and large Pentecostalized, a desire in political and governmental change was the most salient reasons for Venezuelans when they voted for President in 1998.