Using Law to Gut Law: Executive Aggrandizement and Quality of Government Decline in Chávez’s Venezuela

This study examines the relationship between executive aggrandizement and Quality of Government (QoG) deterioration in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. Drawing on the framework of autocratic legalism—whereby legal forms are used to hollow out legal protections—we theorize how constitutional reforms that concentrate executive power through autocratic legalism may systematically undermine the institutional foundations of impartial governance. We employ a synthetic control method to construct a counterfactual governance trajectory for Venezuela, comparing observed outcomes following the 1999 constitutional reforms to what comparable Latin American countries would predict. Our quasi-experimental analysis provides evidence that the institutionalization of executive aggrandizement was associated with modest yet sustained QoG deterioration from 2000 to 2012. This decline manifested primarily through a collapse in the rule of law and rising systemic corruption, patterns consistent with the theoretical mechanisms of autocratic legalism linking constitutional reforms to governance erosion through institutional capture. The findings suggest that constitutional changes concentrating power in the executive, while appearing procedurally legitimate, may potentially compromise the impartial exercise of state authority.