Participatory Budgeting in Brazil by Brian Wampler is an essential text for the curious and discerning reader of one of the most important current innovations in Latin American democracy. As the author argues, participatory budgeting (PB) 'can help to deepen democracy, promote pluralism, and lay the foundations for social justice' (p. 3). The text offers rich contributions to our conceptual understanding of state-society relations, exploring the nature of contestation and cooperation within PB, and the carefully constructed comparisons of observations in eight different municipalities within Brazil offer systematic explanations for PB outcomes. The lessons Wampler draws from his comparisons will be useful to those interested in the public policy of participation, an element that both developed and developing democracies have struggled with over the years. The text also offers valuable new details on well-known cases, such as Porto Alegre, the original home of PB, as well as explanations and observations of less well-known cases that turned out poorly, such as Blumenau.

The manuscript starts with a description of PB based on the Porto Alegre model, an appropriate choice given its well-known status and widely copied architecture. In PB, citizens gather in several rounds of neighborhood and thematic meetings to prioritise public investments and elect delegates to decision-making and oversight councils. The process has a direct impact on the allocation of investment funds, and mobilises citizens to deliberate about public action and to monitor government actions. Wampler's attention to institutional rules and structure, as they are embedded in social contexts, offers a useful warning to those who might transplant the Porto Alegre model to other localities. ‘PB programs are not a universal, one size-fits-all solution’ (p. 281).

Wampler uses the Porto Alegre model as a core archetype, which is convenient because it proves to be the most successful in expanding citizenship and accountability. By accountability, he refers to the way in which citizen participation enhances vertical, horizontal and societal accountability, and by citizenship he enters the debate on Brazilian and Latin American struggles over the ‘right to have rights’ (p. 23). He hypothesises that three factors explain the impact of PB on these outcomes: mayoral commitment to delegating real authority, rule structures that encourage broad-based coalitions within civil society, and a balance of contestation and cooperation in the relationship between civil society and the state.

These last two concepts, contestation and cooperation, are by far the most difficult to manage, and Wampler is right to suspect that this may be the downfall of many attempts at PB. Increasing accountability and citizenship is impossible if civil society is too close to (cooperation) or too far from (contestation) state actors. Striking the correct balance will depend on the context, the issue, and the sequence of events; and few localities are blessed with the correct balance or able to sustain it for long.

To examine the impact of PB, Wampler makes use of both statistical and paired comparisons, gathering observations in eight cities with populations over one hundred thousand people and active PB institutions. Statistical data from public opinion surveys applied to PB delegates reveals differences in the nature of participation and the perceived effects. Among the striking findings, ‘PB programs are drawing low-income citizens into an institutionalized political environment in which they are rewarded for their ability to form groups and engage in meaningful negotiations with their fellow citizens and government officials’ (p. 100). Statistical comparison reveals some useful trends and averages, but does not trace the historical or contextual process by which PB evolved over time, a shortcoming Wampler addresses by probing deeper into his eight cases using qualitative, paired comparison.

The comparisons trace the process by which PB was put in place in eight cities, finding that mayoral support and civil society capacity to use contention are the main determinants of expanded accountability and citizenship. The use of paired comparisons shows that relatively different cities, such as Recife in the Brazilian Northeast and Belo Horizonte in the Southeast, display remarkably similar impacts of PB as a result of these two variables. At the same time, Porto Alegre and Blumenau, both in the South, show markedly different outcomes. The careful selection and rich detail of cases, replete with primary data and interviews with key players, demonstrates the significant investment of time required in order to make sense of the wide variations in Brazilian politics and society. In addition to their methodological utility, the case studies offer interesting stories for any student of Brazil.

As this is a review, and Wampler has demonstrated a commitment to understanding participation in Brazil and elsewhere, one observation offers an avenue for future research. This observation is sparked by events subsequent to the completion of the research in the two cases chosen as examples of expanded citizenship and accountability, Porto Alegre and Ipatinga. Here, Leftist governments were deposed in 2004 after four consecutive electoral victories. The current conservative governments have curtailed accountability and citizenship for poor citizens, exactly where PB had encountered its most propitious circumstances, calling for a reevaluation of a core concept within the PB literature and democratisation more generally: the relationship between state and society.

Most literature has distinguished between clientelist state-society relations and more open and participatory forms of policymaking. Yet, this does not necessarily finish the debate on what class interests are mobilised and served by state policy. Conservative governments have been able to sustain open and participatory forms such as PB while using executive privileges to expand opportunities for accumulation by wealthy citizens, showing little concern for distribution or the social needs of poor citizens. As Wampler shows, successful PB places a check on clientelist and explicitly corrupt uses of public resources, but this evidently does not check the ability of powerful elites to use state power to redistribute wealth upwards through legal means. The electoral viability of the conservative project will be tested in 2008, but PB has not yet proved resilient as a place in which poor, working citizens can defend themselves.