Policy Transfer Through Time for Regime Legitimisation: The Case of Hugo Chavez and Venezuela

The burgeoning literature on policy transfer has focused almost exclusively on the transfer of ideas, institutions and policies from one place to another. Little or no attention has been paid to policy transfer through time. This paper examines policy transfer over a significant period of time - more than 150 years - and how the items transferred have been used as the foundation of regime legitimation. The case in focus is Venezuela under President Hugo Chavez. He resurrected and reinterpreted the ideas contained in the writings of Simon Bolivar, a hero of the 19th century independence struggles in Latin America. The paper examines the ways in which Chavez appropriated and used Bolivar's ideas in a contemporary context to provide legitimacy for his 'revolutionary' regime. Using the data from this Venezuelan case, the paper also builds a model of stages of policy transfer that might be applied to other cases.