Ideological Polarisation in the Venezuelan Presidential Crisis

Abstract

Since January 2019, the presidency of Venezuela has been disputed between Nicolás Maduro and Juan Guaidó. Both leaders claim their legitimacy over the office of the President, andboth have been recognised by different countries and international organisations. In the context of this presidential crisis, a specialised corpus of 5 political speeches and 4 political interviews of these leaders was collected with the purpose of analysing the social and ideological representation of ingroups and outgroups (i.e., the ideological polarisation, van Dijk, 1998a) from a critical socio-cognitive perspective (van Dijk, 2018). The analysis was carried out with Sketch Engine (see Kilgariff et al., 2014) and focused on the collocates and concordances of the main social actors, as well as their frequencies. The results of this corpus-assisted discourse study (Marchi & Taylor, 2018) were critically interpreted considering the socio-political situation, the ideological background of the two Venezuelan presidents, and previous research on polarisation (e.g., Bolívar, 2013b; Gadavanij, 2020; Li and Zhu, 2019). The discourse of Nicolás Maduro evidenced a neo-colonial ideological schema based on a strong polarisation between Bolivarian and imperialist groups. The ingroup was described as revolutionary, Bolivarian, and anti-imperialist, while the outgroup as right-wing imperialist elites. Guaidó was conceptualised as a puppet of the US government and extra-constitutional president, in opposition to Maduro, who was represented as the only legitimate leader, heir of Chávez and Bolívar. As regards Guaidó’s discourse, the ingroup-outgroup polarisation revealed a democracy vs. dictatorship struggle. He portrayed the ingroup as a free, united, democratic movement that would establish a transitional government, and the outgroup as an armed paramilitary dictatorship led by a usurper. Overall, ideological polarisation allowed these leaders to define their political identities and conceptualise themselves as rivals, to reproduce their ideologies and attitudes, and to legitimise themselves and delegitimise the other.