Chavez is president for life

[aelf]

The term I think you're looking for is "illiberal democracy". Venezuela seems to be roughly on par with Singapore or Russia. That is, they have elections which are basically free of fraud and are democratic in the sense that they count the votes accurately and are reflective of a majority of voters voting for the government, but that majority support is maintained and reinforced through massive institutional advantages like dominance of the media, advantageous electoral laws, politicised administrative organs, legal and extralegal harassment of opposition candidates, and so forth.

This post got me thinking, and I don't really agree. While the term 'illiberal democracy' has fairly often been used to describe the Singaporean system, for example, I think it's a bit of a misnomer.

It might depend on how you view the 'liberal' part of liberal democracy. I see liberalism as guaranteeing certain individual (and maybe group) rights even at the expense of democratic decision-making. So a perfectly democratic Islamic republic, for example, would probably be an illiberal democracy. While it's true that places like Singapore are not liberal in that sense, as many of the rights liberalism uphold are frequently ignored, the political system is problematic as far as democracy is concerned too - that is, democratic procedures or principles are (as you say) not followed to a reasonably perfect extent. As such, I think the term 'limited democracy' probably describe such systems better.