1 Forthcoming in a Special Issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. January 2019 POLARIZATION, PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY, AND DEMOCRATIC EROSION IN VENEZUELA’S TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SOCIALISM María Pilar García-Guadilla and Ana Mallen Abstract This article analyzes the emergence and consolidation of political polarization in Venezuela during the so-called Bolivarian Revolution, led by Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro from 1999-2018. Also, the conditions under which polarization has transformed into “pernicious” and has eroded democracy. Given the underlying class cleavages that were associated with pro- and anti-Chavista identities, we argue that the central dimension of polarization began with a political-ideological rift around competing concepts of democracy – participatory and representative, the rights that each vision privileged (individual civil and political rights vs collective social and economic rights) and the interpretation of participatory democracy as a complement or substitute for representative democracy. As a result, the inclusion of representative and participatory models of democracy in the 1999 Bolivarian constitution failed to deepen democracy. Instead, they came to be seen as mutually exclusive or incompatible, leading to pro and anti-Chávez groups to rallied around specific social class interests and adhering to zero-sum proposals. The result was a polarized democracy that became increasingly authoritarian.