Stephanie L. McNulty’s book, Democracy from Above? The Unfulfilled Promise of Nationally Mandated Participatory Reforms, asks whether national politicians can effectively mandate subnational participation, with beneficial effects for democracy and governance, such as expanded participation, increased government responsiveness, and reduced corruption. This question is highly salient not only for those developing countries covered in this excellent book but also for representative democracy generally, in which citizen disengagement and alienation are increasingly widespread. No doubt, the search for measures able to reinvigorate representative democratic institutions is of crucial importance for academics and practitioners alike.

Although the in-depth case studies in the book focus on Latin America, nationally mandated participatory reforms are by no means a “regional” phenomenon, as the cross-national assessment at the start of the book demonstrates. Indeed, it is a pity that in-depth research on the 14 reform cases not covered in the three main case studies, including countries like India or Rwanda, did not make it into the book (although the author does provide a link to an online appendix that any reader should consult).

The findings of this important study are as insightful as they are sobering. As McNulty points out, instead of remedying pitfalls of representative institutions, participatory reforms embedded in them often replicate rather than solve existing problems. Unequal participation, a weak civil society, clientelism, and corruption are central expressions of the “broken promise” of participatory reform. Although some of these expressions are particularly symptomatic for the developing world, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why reforms that might look good on paper do not deliver, even when passed with the best of intentions. That is not to say reforms did not make a difference at all. Yet while widening participation numerically, they did less to overcome inequalities between those who tend to participate and those who tend to do so less, or to change problems fundamentally plaguing the political system such as clientelism or corruption.

McNulty’s book also raises some questions, as any challenging study will do. The book starts with a cross-national analysis of nationally mandated participatory reforms in subnational governments introduced in developing democracies. The scope conditions chosen to identify relevant countries to be considered are convincingly rationalized: 142 (economically) developing countries were included if they had a decentralized state structure and adopted relevant participatory reforms. Covering the period 1985–2015, 17 countries qualified. However, given the fundamental focus of the study of whether and how legal norms are implemented in practice and which effects they have on democratic governance, I had expected the discussion of two systemic properties that seem to be crucial preconditions to reasonably expect beneficial democratic effects of (any) participatory reform in any country. What about minimum levels of rule of law or democracy (for which various indicators are available) to focus on environments in which participatory reforms have some chance to be implemented? The literature on elections in authoritarian and hybrid regimes (for example, Andreas Schedler, Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition, 2006) has stressed that “democratic practice” is only likely to result from the formal requirement to run regular elections when basic rights and protections are guaranteed to those participating in them as well. In unfavorable contexts, elections might be used as mechanisms of control, just as participatory procedures might be used for practices of clientelism and corruption. A more detailed consideration of these systemic scope conditions might have allowed for a discussion regarding the type of political system in which the “promise” attached to participatory reforms is more or less realistic.

McNulty focuses on participatory legal frameworks enshrined in national law and implemented widely across subnational governments that “must give actors meaningful decision-making power” (pp. 20–21). My initial reading of the latter specification was that either individual citizens or civil society organizations through these reforms have been (formally) granted the power to make some binding decisions that are final. If decisions can be modified by elites afterward, their impact is ex ante curtailed. This is even more the case if procedures are consultative (for different methods of public consultation, see Helena Catt and Michael Murphy, “What Voice for the People? Categorising Methods of Public Consultation,” Australian Journal of Political Science 38 (3), 2003). However, in the descriptions of the different institutional designs, the National Public Policy Conferences in Brazil, for instance, seem to be a consultative mechanism directed toward giving recommendations rather than actual decision making (pp. 43–44). Later on in the case studies, civil society participation through Peru’s regional and local coordination councils in subnational planning processes is characterized as ineffective because of its “non-binding” character (p. 134). This is not to downplay “voice mechanisms” that, strictly speaking, do not grant decision-making power, but whether the mechanisms studied do one or the other is of central importance. On the one hand, regional and local political elites have less incentive to undermine procedures if they are not bound by the input received. On the other, the potential to generate democratic effects and the incentive to participate on behalf of groups are likely to be weaker in consultative procedures. Finally, the type of input by citizens or civil society that is legally required provides the yardstick to evaluate whether legal requirements have “only” been implemented ineffectively or whether they have been violated outright.

More detail on the specificities of the legal designs would have been desirable to get a better sense of what difference different legislation could have made. One mechanism explicitly recommended is quotas to enhance participation of marginalized actors (p. 172). In addition, as McNulty persuasively points out, what is the use of mandating civil society participation in Peru if registration as a civil society organization is so demanding that it restricts access to the process before it has even begun? Hence, legal access to the participatory process is crucial (pp. 162–63). Still, I would have liked to hear more about which of the designs systematized at the start of the study might work better under which conditions. Early on, McNulty presents six institutional designs that governments have adopted in the 17 countries covered, such as participatory budgeting laws or citizen or civil society councils (pp. 23, 40). The study analyzes instances of five of the six designs in three in-depth case studies of reforms in Bolivia, Guatemala, and Peru, putting her in an excellent position to assess past reform choices and future options. Intuitively, the “national council system” and even more so the “fourth branch of government” design seem to affect the state structure much more fundamentally than the other designs, because they constitute multilevel governance structures spanning national and subnational levels rather than focusing on lower levels only (pp. 40–44).

But given the overall findings of this study these “design templates” might be of little relevance. The real problem seems to be rule implementation: rules on paper are not put into practice properly, be this due to lack of training or resources or manipulation by subnational elites in the absence of effective oversight. Strikingly, this is the case even though “an implementation mechanism does exist in every case included in the analysis” and “time and effort are being dedicated to implementing these reforms” (p. 21). So maybe the content of rules and formal implementation structures are less central than legal reformers might hope. McNulty stresses the need for support by participants on both the national and subnational levels to assure effective reform implementation (p. 162). That, of course, is a rare constellation in any reform scenario, whether top down or not, because there are bound to be participants benefiting from reform failure (see Camille Bedock, Reforming Democracy. Institutional Engineering in Western Europe, 2017).

A similar question about the nature of the underlying problems that make reforms inefficient again reemerges from a different perspective. The three case studies of Bolivia, Guatemala, and Peru provide fascinating evidence about the difficulties of implementing participatory reforms. However, are these difficulties specific to the class of reforms studied, or are they broader expressions of the decentralization reforms of which they formed part (p. 19)? Decentralization reforms fundamentally affect the power distribution in a political system, vertically and horizontally, between national and subnational institutional actors, on the one hand, and different subnational actors, on the other. In the cross-national chapter McNulty points out that in all countries considered subnational governments have “autonomous powers” and “financial resources” (p. 20), which seems clear enough. However, cross-national research on decentralization stresses the vast variation in competence and resource allocation implemented in different decentralization reforms. Some reforms only decentralize powers to implement national policies; others decentralize considerable decision-making power but too few resources to deliver the respective policies (see Daniel Treisman, The Architecture of Government: Rethinking Political Decentralization, 2007). If reforms are inefficient, how do we know this feature is linked to the specific participatory mechanism rather than more fundamental problems in state structures? Depending on the type of institutional setting considered, it could be either, which is of crucial importance for whether future reform of participatory procedures themselves is likely to improve matters or whether much more fundamental reforms are necessary to enhance subnational democracy and governance.

This research has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 335890 STATORG. This support is gratefully acknowledged.