The Foreign Policy Rhetoric of Populism: Chávez,Oil,and Anti-imperialism

Introduction

President Hugo Chávez was one of the most recognizable figures associated with populism in the popular imagination and in the academic literature (Hawkins 2009). A strong leader with flamboyant style, he claimed to represent the marginalized common people of Venezuela by fighting for them against the traditional political elite at home and the corrupting influence of the United States as the hemispheric and global imperial power. We draw on a discursive approach to begin to think about the foreign policy aspects of populism. We develop a theoretical framework for understanding the type of rhetoric associated with Latin American (and, more specifically, Venezuelan) foreign policy. The framework expects a number of potential roles that may be represented rhetorically by Latin American states in similar positions, but we focus on anti-imperialism as a key rhetorical feature of Chávez’s populist foreign policy rhetoric.

In addition to identifying anti-imperialism as a key rhetorical feature of populist foreign policy under Chávez, we also hypothesize about mechanisms that may explain when it is used. The diversion mechanism suggests that Chávez may more frequently invoke anti-imperialist rhetoric when the price of oil is low. In the “petro-socialist state,” a leader such as Chávez needs the revenues from high oil prices to provide public goods for the masses, which take the form of stimulating consumption and public welfare projects. Absent the oil revenue to support these domestic public goods, Chávez may attempt to divert attention to the United States as the source of all Venezuela’s problems. The diversion mechanism is consistent with what we might typically expect from a populist leader. However, the capacity mechanism suggests that higher oil prices enable Chávez to engage in pan-American strategies to unite the region against the United States. These projects included multilateral attempts to unite trading blocs, provide an international bank as an alternative to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), provide access to cheap oil, as well as many other bilateral initiatives. Such projects require high oil prices and revenue such that the capacity to engage in anti-imperialist rhetoric matches the behavior. This could be considered a political economy model of rhetoric, and while not previously theorized by studies of populism, it may prove useful to understand the rhetoric of a leftist, resource populist such as Chávez.

We test these alternative mechanisms using a dataset of all the transcribed Aló Presidente weekly television programs broadcast by Chávez. These transcripts, 385 in total, cover the period May 1999–January 2012 and allow us to identify the salience of Chávez’s anti-imperialistic rhetoric. For all the transcripts, we identify the number of sentences that talk about imperialism and aggregate these to the quarterly level. We then proceed to create a quarterly time series that we merge with data on the price of oil, presidential approval, and other control variables. With these data, we test our theory by running an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. We find empirical support for the capacity mechanism. When oil prices are high, the frequency of use of anti-imperialist rhetoric increases. Our findings are suggestive for other leftist leaders relying on natural resource wealth to fund their populist programs. Our theoretical and empirical framework also helps to advance both the study of populism and foreign policy, as well as the study of Latin American foreign policy.

We proceed with a brief overview of populism and situate our approach within the discursive approach to populism, then describe Chávez’s populist project, as well as his reliance on oil revenue to fund domestic and foreign policies. Next, we develop a theoretical framework that allows us to identify potential foreign policy roles that a state such as Venezuela in the Latin American context might adopt. We focus on anti-imperialism and generate expectations for mechanisms that may link the price of oil to the frequency of its invocation. We then describe our data and method, report the results of the analyses, and conclude with some more general thoughts about populist foreign policy.

A Discursive Approach to Latin American Populism

Populism is a prime example of an “essentially contested” (Weyland 2001) or even “fractured” concept (Taggart 2000). This is, no doubt, due to the problems that scholars encounter when they try to achieve successful alignment across the intension (internal attributes), extension (referents in the real world), and a label that covers both (Gerring 1999, 357–58). Scholars often “add adjectives” to populism to try and clarify the intension, such as “resource” populism or “leaderless” populism (Collier and Levitsky 1997). Others may simply stretch the label of populism to cover more and more disparate cases in the extension, leading to conceptual stretching. While we do not intend to resolve the debate about populism’s connotation and denotation, we will be clear about which conceptual approach we focus on in this project. In some ways, this is simpler given that we are drawn to the case of Hugo Chávez, who, regardless of connotation, is almost always identified as a case of a populist leader (Hawkins 2009). This gives us some flexibility in our approach to populism, even though we recognize that building definitions based on cases is one of the reasons populism has become so contested as a concept.

According to Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2014, 377), there are four main conceptual approaches to populism, including discourse, pathology, style, and strategy. Populism as a discourse focuses on a set of ideas or a “mental map” in which the elites are acting in their own self-interest and, therefore, in opposition to the interests of the people. As a pathology, populism is often defined as a kind of disease affecting democracy that often proposes reckless and usually more autocratic solutions to the perceived governance problems of the elite. Populism as a style is characterized by emotional appeals for simple solutions to complex problems. As a strategy, populism involves a “personalistic leader” who “seeks or exercises government power based on direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers” (Weyland 2001, 14). Each of these connotations refers to internal attributes of populism that would likely classify Hugo Chávez as a populist. Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2014, 378) note that the style and strategy approaches to populism typically are “linked to flamboyant and strong figures,” such as Chávez. ¹ Populist leaders such as Chávez are also known to subvert democratic institutions as in the pathology approach, but it is the discursive approach in which leaders such as Chávez either develop or draw upon an ideology that interests us the most in this project.

Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2012) propose a “minimal” concept of populism rooted in the discursive approach, which we also adopt for the purposes of this paper. They adopt the definition of Mudde (2004, 543), in which populism is

a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic camps, “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite,” and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.

Populism of this sort has experienced multiple waves in Latin America, including the classic populism of the 1930s and 1960s (e.g., Perón and Vargas), neoliberal populism of the 1990s (e.g., Fujimori and Collor de Mello), and radical leftist populism of the 2000s (e.g., Chávez and Morales). Populism in Latin America has clearly been a project of both the Left and Right, and is often connected to caudillismo given the centrality of strong leaders in the region (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2014, 384–85). ² The legacy of populism has likely “shaped the political arena” in Latin America given its frequent appearance across time and space (Collier and Collier 1991), perhaps as a result of “relative deficiencies in trust among the electorate in the traditional political institutions of liberal democracy” (Doyle 2011, 1449).

Chávez’s discourse has certainly emphasized populist themes. As Ellner (2003, 145–46) notes, he emphasized his status as an outsider who attacked the elites in the political class. His appeals were made to the marginalized sectors of society ignored by traditional politicians. He even played up his indigenous features to connect with the masses of Venezuelan society not represented by elites. Chávez emphasized that his government would care for the lower classes, work to eradicate neoliberalism, and continue to challenge the imperialists in the United States. Spanakos (2008) suggested that Chávez’s populism may even have reshaped how citizenship was understood with his rhetorical emphasis on active engagement in politics, bringing excluded people into the “popular economy,” and promoting solidarity among groups that face the security or economic threat from the United States. ³ Chávez’s policies were aimed at providing for the lower classes through the misiones, ⁴ halting privatization and other neoliberal policies, and confronting the United States. In terms of foreign relations with the United States, Chávez worked to increase oil prices within the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Companies (OPEC) and visited Iraq, Iran, and Libya to pursue these efforts—all of which were at odds with U.S. policies (Corrales and Romero 2013; Ellner 2003). He furthermore voted against U.S. resolutions in international bodies designed to isolate or censor Cuba, China, and Iran with regard to human rights violations. He prevented the United States from using Venezuelan airspace for drug eradication and interdiction purposes. Most important from a symbolic perspective was Chávez’s repeated rejections of U.S. hegemony and imperialism.

While the aforementioned discussion makes clear that Chávez’s rhetoric of leftist populism is mutually reinforcing at both the domestic and international levels, we focus on his foreign policy rhetoric. According to Dodson and Dorraj (2008, 74), “the principal thrust of Chavez’s foreign policy is twofold: anti-imperialism and pan-Americanism, both of which draw on the memory of Simon Bolivar’s dream of Latin American unity.” Dodson and Dorraj (2008) suggest that Chávez has pursued these twin objectives through a policy of soft-balancing. Soft-balancing against the United States may provide increased Venezuelan autonomy from the United States at the same time as it helps to unite Latin America behind his Bolivarian dream. Examples of efforts toward these ends include Chávez’s opposition to the Bush administration’s goal of a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), which he sought to replace with his own Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA). Such a trade bloc would focus on poverty reduction through trade integration, thus, upholding the principles of his domestically oriented populism through foreign policy. Chávez also supported the merging of Mercosur and the Andean Community into the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), which proposes free movement of citizens, reduction/elimination of tariffs, and potentially a common currency. He proposed the creation of the Bank of the South (Banco del Sur) that could replace the IMF for Latin America. Furthermore, he funded TeleSur, which would carry anti-U.S. and populist messaging across Latin America.

In terms of oil policy, the “petro-alliance” has been a primary tool of soft-balancing to counter the United States’ hegemonic position in Latin America (Dodson and Dorraj 2008, 84). Chávez created several initiatives known as PetroSur and PetroCaribe designed to move oil throughout the region with discounted prices, access to cheap credit, or even in-kind payment for oil, such as agricultural products. He also struck bilateral agreements with neighboring governments, such as the construction of a gas pipeline with Colombia, a refinery in northeastern Brazil, oil and gas development in Bolivia, and refining Ecuadorian oil at reduced prices. Chávez even purchased Argentine bonds that assisted the country with paying off its IMF debt.

It may be the case that one of the primary causes for the rise of radical left populism is “the availability of huge raw material rents” (Weyland 2009, 158). Resource wealth certainly challenges the neoliberal emphasis on privatization, deregulation, and other policies designed to promote productive and competitive economies. Instead, resource wealth focuses politics and populist discourse on the distribution of this wealth. Doyle’s (2011, 1463) empirical analysis finds a significant, positive correlation between commodities (ore and fuel exports as a percentage of GDP) and vote share for populist presidential candidates in Latin America. Populist leaders such as Chávez in resource-rich states have turned their rhetoric and behavior toward attacking and increasing rents from the extractive sector. As Tsafos (2007, 150) states, “resource populism is politically driven.” Numerous scholars have noted the importance of oil revenue for achieving both domestic and political populist objectives (Álvarez 2007; Hidalgo 2008; Sylvia and Danopoulos 2003), including its increased influence across Latin America (Arriagada-Herrera 2006; Poertner 2011).

The “popular economy” that Chávez desired in Venezuela developed “slowly, unevenly, and not without contradiction” (Spanakos 2008, 532). Economic policy was still relatively liberal from 1999 until the 2002 coup d’état. Oil prices were also relatively low during this time period. After that time, Chávez pursued fiscal and monetary expansion driven by oil revenues, which has both spurred consumption and supported social projects such as the misiones. According to Spanakos (2008, 533), the petroleum strategy at the heart of this expansion included reinvigorating OPEC, cutting oil production while driving up prices, increasing royalty taxes, imposing a windfall tax, and nationalizing oil production. This strategy was consistent with the populist rhetoric of reclaiming economic sovereignty over the most important industry in Venezuela at the expense of the imperialist United States and oil companies it supported. While it is certainly a manifestation of anti-imperialism, the rhetorical claims to be a socialist strategy and anti-capitalist are questionable given the reliance on state capitalism.

Thus, we see in discursive leftist populism a strong, flamboyant leader who advocates on behalf of the common people and interprets/constructs their general will in his efforts to fight the traditional elite. The traditional elite represents all of the problems that a country has faced in the past, including political and economic stagnation, the loss of economic sovereignty to domestic and foreign elites who extract the country’s resources for their own benefit, and continued acceptance of the political and economic oppression of U.S. imperialism. The addition of natural resource wealth allows the populist leader to support his ideology with rents and taxes on such wealth (often referred to as “resource” or “oil” populism). Chávez’s combination of ideology and resource wealth allowed him to win multiple elections and rule Venezuela for nearly fourteen years. In the next section, we focus on developing a theoretical framework to explain Chávez’s discursive populism as it intersected with foreign policy. Given the central importance of U.S. anti-imperialism and its connection through domestic elites to his ideology and activities within Venezuela, we suggest that such foreign policy deserves further scrutiny.

A Framework for Explaining a Leftist Populist Foreign Policy in Latin America

Analyses of populist foreign policy are relatively rare, and primarily focused on Europe (Chryssogelos 2017). Liang (2007) finds that far right parties adopt populist foreign policies in the form of Euroskepticism, anti-Americanism, anti-immigration, anti-Islam, skepticism of Turkey joining the European Union, and a focus on issues such as terrorism. Chryssogelos (2010) identified a common populist approach spanning left and right parties on issues such as transatlantic relations and global governance. Most important, populists tend to be against the United States and globalization across the board. Similar work on Italian far right parties finds opposition to immigration and anti-Americanism as well as fears of globalization (Verbeek and Zaslove 2015).

Certainly, recent elections in the United States, Hungary, the Philippines, as well as strong right-wing populist movements in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, call attention to the need for further exploration of populism’s effects on foreign policy. President Trump’s trade tariffs and withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as well as his “America First” policy regarding both economics and security, are revising long-held views on the consistency of U.S. foreign policy. Brexit and its aftermath have left the British establishment trying to both figure out how to implement this populist foreign policy and calculate its costs. It is these types of populist foreign policies that led Chryssogelos (2017) to advocate for more work on populism and foreign policy, including populism outside of Europe, such as Latin America.

Unfortunately, we also lack a comprehensive theoretical framework to explain Latin American foreign policy and the role that populism may play in its formulation. Hey’s (1997) review of the literature produced three building blocks of a general foreign policy framework for Latin America. These building blocks represent three overlapping orientations: pro-core versus anti-core, autonomous versus dependent, and economic versus political. A pro-core versus anti-core orientation concerns whether policymakers are amenable or hostile to the dominant powers and their global order. An autonomous versus dependent orientation refers to policymakers’ abilities to develop and conduct foreign policy with(out) foreign influence. Economic versus political orientation refers to the scholarly focus of foreign policy analysis, rather than an orientation of the policymaker. Hey (1997, 650–51) concludes that Latin American foreign policy is “in essence about dependence,” and that leader/party/regime ideology and pressure from the dominant states are the most important factors driving foreign policy. Hey’s (1997) conclusions about the centrality of autonomy and dependence are echoed in other reviews of Latin American foreign policy (Drekonja-Kornat 1986; Giacalone 2012).

Thies (2017) used the aforementioned insights to develop a typology of Latin American foreign policy role conceptions. This typology was based on the interaction of the pro-core versus anti-core and autonomous versus dependent orientations. Thies (2017) argued that Venezuela should be classified as an autonomous and anti-core state. This led to the identification of twelve foreign policy role conceptions that were expected to be observed under the Chávez regime, including regional leader, anti-imperialist agent, and faithful ally, among others. Of the different roles in the typology, one of the most frequent foreign policy roles identified was the anti-imperialist agent. This role, which has been previously identified for Venezuela under Chávez in numerous studies, including Sekhri (2009), Trinkunas (2005), and Zúquete (2008), will be the focus of our study.

Because foreign policy roles are rhetorical representations of positions in a social system or the kinds of actor it is possible to be (Thies 2010), we can draw on this framework for thinking about the foreign policy rhetoric of populism. We will focus on the rhetoric of anti-imperialism given that it has been described by analysts as a cornerstone of Chávez’s foreign policy. Yet, given that anti-imperialism is only one form of rhetoric or role that might be observed, we also wish to explain under what conditions we should observe Chávez invoking anti-imperialism. We expect that the price of oil, rather than the state of economic conditions generally, may provide the conditions under which anti-imperialist populist rhetoric is used. We focus on oil, because we know that Chávez’s petroleum strategy was to drive up the price of oil, which would allow him to stimulate consumption in the economy. His followers would, therefore, have the feeling of being wealthy when oil is high, but potentially feeling disheartened when the price of oil is low. Yet, if Chávez builds a well of legitimacy from times of high oil prices, spending, and consumption, he may be able to weather the low oil price periods. We, therefore, have two main mechanisms to consider as explanations for the use of anti-imperialism as a form of discursive populist foreign policy: diversion and capacity.

Data and Method

In our theory, we have highlighted two possible paths for Hugo Chávez’s anti-imperialistic rhetoric. In this section, we describe the research design to test our theory. To evaluate our argument, we use a novel dataset constructed from Hugo Chávez’s weekly radio and television program Aló Presidente. This program, which could last anywhere from two to eight hours, was the main communication tool of the Chávez administration until his death. Its audience consisted not only of die-hard government supporters—who tuned in every Sunday morning religiously—but also of journalists, politicians, and some opposition supporters who wanted to hear what the president had to say. Although there was some variance, the television shows were carried out on a weekly schedule. The most cancelations occurred during international tours, elections, and during Chávez’s fight with cancer. The television show, despite being a mixture of policy, insults, and reminiscences of the past, is the most systematic way of collecting Chávez’s direct communication with the people of Venezuela (Frajman 2014; Love and Windsor 2018), and a venue for policy discussion (Cañizález 2012), as well as a tool for strategic political attacks (Solis and Sagarzazu 2017), and, as such, is the best venue to identify whether diversion or capacity influence Chávez’s anti-imperialistic rhetoric. From the first episode in May 1999 to the last one in January 2012, there were a total of 385 editions of Aló Presidente.

To identify Chávez’s anti-imperialistic rhetoric, we adopted the following procedure. First, we took the transcripts of every Aló Presidente and stripped them of any text from speakers other than President Hugo Chávez (this could include members of the cabinet, members of the audience, or phone calls). Second, each text was subdivided into sentences. For each sentence, we identified if the sentence mentioned variations of the word “imperialism,” which include “empire,” “imperialistic,” “imperialism,” and so forth. ⁵ The 385 television show transcripts in our dataset produced nearly 330,000 total sentences. The term “imperialism” appeared in 2,024 of these sentences over a total of 267 episodes. Here are some examples of the use of anti-imperialist rhetoric:

We coincide here with the blackmailing, and threats of the empire, we always tell our truths to the empire, to the empire . . . (Aló Presidente # 267, February 23, 2007) ⁶

Anyways, while the empire there, it’s spokespeople take this with calm, and they were asked, look, but are you going to block Venezuela? (Aló Presidente # 321, September 14, 2008) ⁷

Well, in reality it’s laughable, the Yankee empire is laughable, it’s laughable. (Aló Presidente # 376, January 8, 2012) ⁸

Once all the sentences that mentioned the relevant terms were identified, we proceeded to count these and aggregate them to the year-quarter level, effectively generating a measure of attention to anti-imperialistic rhetoric. ⁹ Figure 1 shows the total number of sentences per episode where the terms for imperialism were used as well as the total number of sentences in each episode; for ease of visualization, all of these series have been smoothed. After an average of ten sentences toward the beginning of his presidency, Hugo Chávez tones down his attention to these themes until after the 2004 referendum where both series start increasing again.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Mentions of “imperialism” in Chávez’s Aló Presidente.

After identifying attention to imperialism, we proceeded to create our dependent variable. Due to the lack of television programs for every single month from 1999 to 2012, we aggregated these data at the quarterly level. Furthermore, to control for the varying length of programs and number of episodes per quarter, we divided the number of sentences about imperialism by the total number of sentences per quarter. On average, Chávez talks close to 0.5 percent of the time about imperialism. While this number might seem small considering the length of a program to be eight hours, 0.5 percent of those is five minutes—on television, that is a significant amount of time.

Given our theoretical argument about diversion and capacity and their relationship to oil prices, our main independent variable is the average quarterly value of a barrel of oil from the U.S. Department of Energy. ¹⁰ Figure 2 shows the price of oil series together with the mentions of imperialism by Hugo Chávez; as it can be seen these series grow in parallel over the years. We furthermore control for presidential popularity (Love and Windsor 2018) using the average of negative evaluations about President Chávez of the monthly barometer of Venezuelan polling firm Datanalisis. We control for quarterly GDP for Venezuela based on the data from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC–CEPAL), due to the possibility that economic growth and not the price of oil may be driving the rhetoric. We add a variable to control for which of the three presidential terms Chávez was serving (1999–2000; 2000–2006; 2006–2012) and an alternative variable counting the number of quarters in office. We add a dummy variable to control for U.S. President George W. Bush’s term in office, as he was a particular target of Chavez’s rhetoric. Finally, we control for important, noninstitutionalized political events such as the 2002 coup d’état, the oil strike (2002–2003), the recall referendum of 2004, and the protests against the closure of television station RCTV as these events may influence Chávez’s rhetoric (Solis and Sagarzazu 2017).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Mentions of “imperialism” in Chávez’s Aló Presidente versus price of oil.

Analysis

Due to the time-series nature of our dataset, we proceed to test the stationarity of our dependent and independent variables. Upon closer inspection (via the Augmented Dickey Fuller test), we identify that the price of oil, public opinion, and GDP measures are not stationary processes, and, as such, we proceed to differentiate these three series. Our dependent variable proves to be stationary. Finally, we identify a two-lag structure for our independent variable, and, as such, we will include these two lags as part of our model. Our final model takes the following form:

Attn Imperialism = Δ ( oil prices ) + Δ ( disaproval ) + Δ ( gdp growth ) + [ term | quartersInOffice ] + events + POTUS + Attn Imperialism t - 1 + Attn Imperialism t - 2

Table 1 shows the results for three models, one with both the term in office and the number of quarters in office and two models with these variables independently. All three models show the same results demonstrating the statistically significant effect of the increase in the price of oil on anti-imperialist rhetoric. This effect, while having a small coefficient, can have a significant impact on Chávez’s attention to imperialism. When the price of oil drops by $25 in a quarter (2 standard deviations), attention to imperialism is reduced by 0.5 (see Figure 3); the mirror effect happens when the price of oil increases by $25, increasing attention to imperialism. Substantively, this means that a drastic increase in the price of oil can have the impact of doubling the attention given to imperialism, with a similar negative effect for a decrease.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Regression Results for Attention to Imperialism.

	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3
Δ(oil prices)	.00014441***	.00014124***	.00014482***
Δ(disapproval)	−.000032	−.0000673	−.00001724
Δ(GDP growth)	−1.516e-10	−1.144e-10	−1.429e-10
Events	−.00133935	−.00162134	−.00117861
Term	.00084329	.00122434
Quarters in office	.00011161		.00013298
Bush	.00368456	.00166474	.00346536
AttnImperialism
t–1	−.1492727	−.05210722	−.14218221
t–2	.47453715*	.57440936**	.50383994**
Constant	−.00466347	−.00183044	−.00329177
N	36	36	36
r 2	.676	.670	.674
Log likelihood	175.14324	174.82859	175.00921

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Predicted attention to imperialism as a function of price of oil.

These results support our second hypothesis that capacity is what drives Chávez’s rhetoric. This is inconsistent with what might be seen as the general expectation for a populist—that they try to divert the public’s attention from bad economic news. It is an interesting finding for a leftist, resource populist—that it is their dependence on the resource itself that drives the rhetoric. This increased revenue also allowed Chávez to develop a foreign petro-policy, where Venezuela provided oil to Latin American neighbors, and even to the cities of London and New York, at very low rates either with generous financing options or in exchange for goods or services (Arriagada-Herrera 2006).

Our analysis also shows that unlike what may be the general impression now, Chávez was not always consistently an anti-imperialistic fighter. In fact, after his first year and during the convulsive years from 2001 to 2004, his anti-imperialistic rhetoric was nonexistent, and it is not until his turn to “Socialism of the XXIst Century” after his 2006 reelection that these attacks pick up in his Sunday television show.

Conclusion

Latin America as a region has a long history with imperialism. First, due to its origins as colonies of Spain and Portugal, but quickly after independence, due to the growing power of the United States and its desire to control the Western Hemisphere. Since then, the history of American intervention in Latin American domestic affairs has been frequent, giving rise to rallying cries of Latin American populist leaders, particularly those of the Left, as well as of folk singers. Long is the list of songs of Latin American revolutionaries that contain some version of the lyrics “Gringo go home, Yankee go home.”

Since the era of the Washington Consensus and the resurgence of the Latin American Left, these chants and slogans have been taken by some of the new leaders of this “pink tide.” One of those most charismatic of these leftist populists was Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. In this study, we set out to understand when Chávez used anti-imperialistic rhetoric, as an entry point into expanding our knowledge about populist foreign policy more generally.

Based on a rich literature on political communication (e.g., Solt 2001; Tavits and Potter 2015), we argued that one possibility is that Chávez used anti-imperialistic rhetoric as a way of diverting attention from growing economic problems. In a resource-dependent country such as Venezuela, such problems are directly tied to the fate of the oil industry. Alternatively, however, we argued that a better economic situation (fueled by oil prices) gives leaders such as Chávez the internal and external capacity to become less dependent on the United States and, therefore, leads to increased anti-imperialistic rhetoric.

Through an analysis of the transcripts of Chávez’s weekly Aló Presidente television show, we found that when the price of oil increases, so does Chávez’s anti-imperialistic rhetoric, which provided evidence confirming our capacity hypothesis. This finding is interesting because it confirms the view that resources give leaders the ability to engage in domestic programs to support the common people, such as Chávez’s misiones, and external programs to combat U.S. influence, such as Venezuela’s oil diplomacy. The rhetoric also matches the capacity, which is not something traditionally expected from populists who are typically seen as providing unrealistic or simplistic solutions to complex problems or, more frequently, simply diverting attention from real problems to threats that are constructed domestically or abroad. Diversion was clearly not Chávez’s strategy, at least as far as his use of anti-imperialist rhetoric can demonstrate. Chávez’s anti-imperialistic rhetoric did not soar after the U.S.-sponsored coup or during the months of the oil strike in late 2002. Instead, 2002 shows some of the lowest levels of anti-imperialistic rhetoric during Chávez’s tenure.

Future work might explore the generalizability of our findings about Chávez’s foreign policy rhetoric. Do other populists (left or right) in resource-rich economies similarly become emboldened during periods of high commodity prices, consistent with our capacity mechanism? Or, do they engage in diversion when commodity prices are low? Perhaps more nuanced patterns will emerge in greater comparative study that would help us understand the conditions under which resource wealth shapes the populist leader’s foreign policy rhetoric. What kind of rhetoric beyond anti-imperialism may help us investigate populist foreign policy? While anti-imperialism may be a usual trope for leftist populists, we should also investigate the rhetoric of right-wing populists, too. Given the current wave of populism seeming to wash over the world, we are likely to see more contemporary and future cases to add to those of Chávez and other historical populists of the past.