Can radical political-economic transformation be achieved by electoral regimes that have not thoroughly reconstructed the state? Contemporary Venezuela offers an optimal venue for examining this question. The Chavista movement did not replace the previous state: instead, its leaders attempted to reform existing state entities and establish new ones in pursuit of its transformation agenda. It has also used its oil wealth to support cooperatively-oriented economic activity, without necessarily fundamentally altering the property structure. Thus, the social change-oriented political economy exists alongside the traditional one. Focusing on agrarian transformation, we examine ethnographically how these factors have impacted the state's capacity to attain its goal of national food sovereignty. We find that the state's ability to accomplish this objective has been compromised by lack of agency-level capacity, inter-agency conflict and the persistence of the previously-extant agrarian property structure. These dynamics have influenced the state to shift from its initial objective of food sovereignty to a policy of nationalist food security.

Research on East-Central Europe suggests that the transitions from state socialism to capitalism generated civil society. The present authors focus on the effects of a transition of the opposite variety: from capitalism towards state socialism. Both kinds of transitions are characterized by a disjuncture between enduring political economies and legitimate discourses calling for them to be changed. Marshaling qualitative and quantitative data, the authors demonstrate the existence, and assess the effects, of such a disjuncture in the case of Venezuela between circa 2000 and 2010. They examine a subset of rural civic organizations, showing that they referenced mutually-incompatible aspects of the disjointed state when developing their programs, leading them to within-class heterogeneity and occasional across-classes convergence, as is characteristic of pluralist civil society.

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