The Hugo Chavez Frias administration (1999-present) is the most polarizing government in Venezuela since the late 1940s and in Latin America as a whole since the Sandinistas ruled Nicaragua in the 1980s. Supporters admire Chavez for having inaugurated a new form of democracy, so-called ‘participatory’, which is unabashedly anti-party and presumably more attuned to ordinary citizens. They also admire his call for an alternative economic model, a ‘socialism of the 21st century’, which is decidedly anti-globalization and pro-poor, at least in words. For critics, these are pretty-sounding slogans intended to disguise a new form of authoritarianism – one that uses democratic instruments (electoral majorities) to produce undemocratic outcomes (exclusion of political opponents). Each side sees the other as politically threatening. The disputes between them plunged Venezuela into new levels of political instability. Venezuela in the 1970s was considered a paradigmatic case for the study of democratization, and in the 1980s, for the study of democratic decay. In the 1990s, it became a paradigmatic case for the study of policy incoherence. In the early 2000s, it has emerged as a paradigmatic case for the study of political polarization. The best works on the Chavez administration focus on the evolution of the political regime – what exactly happened to Venezuela’s democracy in the past 40 years? Yet, even these works have made insufficient progress in understanding the nature of opposition politics under Chavez. In most democracies, the opposition obsesses about how to defeat incumbents. Only in few democracies do opponents and incumbents take the extreme steps witnessed in Venezuela in 2001-04. This essay is an attempt at drawing lessons from the Venezuelan case to construct theories of political polarization. However, the most recent arguments on the issue of regime type in Venezuela will first be reviewed. This issue is crucial because to understand the dynamics of polarization requires first understanding state policy, which is intrinsically linked to regime type. For that reason, the first part of this essay reviews existing arguments on: 1) the conceptualization of the Chavez regime – is it democratic?; and 2) the origins of the regime, which depending on how the first question is answered, is an exercise in debating theories about the origins of democracy or authoritarianism. I will focus mostly on works published since 2000. After discussing the debate on regime type, I offer some thoughts on how the Venezuelan case can illuminate our theoretical understanding of political polarization.