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Most improvements are due to grass roots action, not ideology, personality cults or the centralized state.
Grass roots movements follow a certain ideology when attempting to attain certain goals, it's an inevitability of some sort. The thing is it depends on how "strict" it's followed or if it allows for revision down the line. I think most that are reasonable aren't followed strictly and allow for revision and critique within its own ranks.
Chavez didn't improve working conditions or increase benefits, the Venezuelan people did, they would have still put pressure on the government to make these concessions without him.
Chávez was a natural outgrowth of this. You had people in Venezuela in the trade/labor unions doing collective bargaining/striking/fighting for their working rights, just like any other place. Just like you had people in the West who were involved in trade/labor union, left-wing politics, ect. fighting for the 8 hour work day and the five day work week. These things weren't just given to the workers of course.
The party of Chávez and himself went slightly a little further though, and were *almost* completely against neoliberal economics and the Washington Consensus, the IMF, World Bank, most free trade and free trade international organizations, ect. Sitting on top of very rich oil also drew quite some attention as well. If Bush,
et al. was ever serious about invading Venezuela the unpopularity of the Iraq War put a stop to that.
Chavez was just one of many politicians who wanted to get into power by making these promises, and power corrupts, to beat the competition he needed to do favors to get money for political campaigning, break promises, make only token efforts to cut costs, cater to extremists for their votes, use logical fallacies and use emotional appeals.
I will concede that the last few years near the end of his life his government started to become a bit corrupt, but I expect this of
any government that's in power for too long. There should have been term limits put in place in the 1999 Constitution at least, perhaps there will be a future referendum put forth on that very issue.
What about ideology? I can imagine socialism had some influence in promoting grass roots action, however it was definitely not Chavez's brand of socialism, neither was its influence significant compared to practical motivations.
Left-wing politics are an outgrowth of grass roots action, and Chávez was no different in this case. Chávez and his party (PSUV) were Democratic Socialist in nature, pretty close to what George Orwell was advocating the last 20-30 years before he died, and in the time since the creation of NATO, Democratic Socialist parties (especially in Europe) are considered somewhat radical (not Soviet/Stalin/Trotskyist type radical of course) because of the phenomenon of the Overton Window (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window).
Remove Chavez or socialism from the equation and not much happens.
Depends wholly on what you replace it with. If you replace it with a typical Christian Democrat right-wing government, you're right probably not *too* much would happen, but that depends on how much they're willing to go against public opinion and start slashing and cutting things that the people fought hard to attain.