Introduction
From time to time, a region of the world captures the attention of social scientists because people there achieve some important human value to an extent greater than the rest of us have managed to do. In the 1970s, the Scandinavian and Northern European social democracies earned the world's envy for their remarkable accomplishments in equality, solidarity, and welfare. Accordingly, many social scientists sought to understand the political and economic keys to their success.Footnote 1 In the 1980s and 1990s, another tantalizing puzzle presented itself. How did the East Asian “tigers” of the Pacific Rim—especially South Korea and Japan, but also Taiwan and Singapore—escape the double oppressions of poverty and predatory dictatorship that condemned billions in other low- and middle-income countries? The answers lay in rich accounts of the developmental state, industrial relations, and political economy more broadly.Footnote 2
In a similar vein, the four books discussed here suggest that many of us may soon turn our eyes to Latin America, and to Brazil in particular, to understand their accomplishments in democratic governance. If these books are right, Brazil is an epicenter of democratic revitalization and institutional invention. In cities across Brazil, millions of citizens are participating in a wide range of novel institutions of participatory democratic governance that confer control over municipal investments, urban planning, health care, community development, and other areas of local public life.
These four books complement each other to create a mosaic of the variation, potential, and limits of the participatory initiatives that have taken root in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America over the past two decades. Therefore, these volumes should interest not just—or even especially—Latin Americanists but also scholars concerned with the prospects for deepening democracy anywhere. Given the challenges that face the political practices of the older North Atlantic representative democracies, understanding democratic innovations from Brazil and other developing countries is especially urgent. The legitimation crisis of American democracy, for instance, is quantified by public opinion polls revealing that very large majorities feel that the nation “is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves,” rather than “for the benefit of all.”Footnote 3 Following the deficit debacle of summer 2011, 82% of survey respondents disapproved of the way that Congress was managing the public's budget.Footnote 4 The substantive and procedural defects of modern representative government are not new to democratic theorists. Contemporary American democracy falls far short of the standards of a deliberative democracy.Footnote 5 Nor, it seems, is it particularly aggregative.Footnote 6
Some of the most interesting work in democratic theory develops alternatives to address such deficits of representative democracy.Footnote 7 Just last year, Perspectives on Politics featured a symposium on the work of Pierre Rosanvallon, who suggests that a range of nonelectoral mechanisms can deepen the quality of democracy.Footnote 8 Rosanvallon looks to increased transparency to allow citizens to monitor officials, popular mobilization to resist laws and politics, and juridical arenas in order to render judgments that can tame governmental action.Footnote 9 As important and promising as these nonelectoral components of democratic governance are, Philippe Schmitter correctly identifies informality as seriously limiting the normative appeal of Rosanvallon's account. The “counter-power” that Rosanvallon describes emerges “erratically and indirectly” in mostly noninstitutionalized forms. This informality undermines equality, a principal democratic value, because counter-power is accessible to those who possess the resources and wherewithal to mobilize. Informality further undermines reliability because “its efficacy depends upon a complex and unpredictable set of linkages.”Footnote 10 Against this criticism, Brazilian innovations that fuse participatory and representative democracy merit special attention precisely because they deploy institutionalized mechanisms to address deficits of equality, accountability, and legitimacy.
Although the political developments described in the following sections all come from Latin America, I discuss them through the lens of a generalist and as a democratic theorist. Setting these studies against the rich debates about Latin American democratization far exceeds my expertise. That said, these developments may come as a surprise to those who have followed with even fleeting attention the pessimistic scholarship on Latin America. Perhaps because they have focused on developments at the national level, much of this literature seeks to explain how and why politics in Latin America is democratically defective. It is a literature that is famously replete with adjectives that lower our expectations for Latin American strains of democracy:Footnote 11 “delegated democracy,”Footnote 12 “authoritarian democracy,” “military-dominated democracy,” and many others. I will not comment further upon the sharp difference between the perspective of those senior Latin American scholars and that of the upstart younger cohort reviewed here except to say that perhaps the times, they are a changin'.
Robert Dahl Was Right
In an article that fell out of fashion long ago among scholars of American politics, Robert Dahl argued that the Greeks had the right scale for democracy. If a central feature of democracy is that citizens are engaged in addressing common problems by fashioning their own laws and policies, the scale of a democracy cannot be so large that the voice of any individual citizen is minute, the seat of power too removed, or public decisions irrelevant to his or her concerns. On the other hand, if the scale of government is too small, it will lack the authority to address important problems. From these contending logics of scale, Dahl concludes, “As the optimum unit for democracy in the 21st Century, the city has a greater claim, I think, than any other alternative.”Footnote 13
It is at the level of the medium-size city—not the metropolis or metropolitan area and certainly not the gargantuan nation-state—that citizens acutely feel the presence or lack of public goods and services, at which they can know their political officials and one another, and at which much of the business of politics and government is cognizable. In principle, then, the size of the city at least makes possible a kind of citizen participation that is impossible at the larger scale of the nation-state.
The democratic possibilities indicated by Dahl are largely absent from modern cities, however.Footnote 14 Appropriate scale is one necessary condition of participatory democracy, but it is far from sufficient. If we concede that urban democracy is possible—a concession that many resist—it likely requires supportive constitutional, structural, political, social, and technological conditions.Footnote 15 Recent developments in Brazil seem to have established particularly favorable conditions for the emergence of participatory democracy.
More than in most other countries in the world, Brazilian cities are important legal, political, fiscal, and administrative entities. Gianpaolo Baiocchi and his colleagues argue that strong processes of political and governmental decentralization have been at work in Brazil since the 1970s.Footnote 16 The 1988 Constitution was a milestone in this decentralization. Cities now stand in equal political status to states and possess the power to make their own constitutions. Fiscally, cities have received substantial systematic transfers from national coffers, as well as powers to raise certain taxes. Brian Wampler notes that municipalities control between 15% and 20% of all government spending in Brazil.Footnote 17 Municipal governments are in turn responsible for providing many critical public services, such as health care, primary education, and transportation.Footnote 18 In a striking contrast to the constitutional provisions of the senior North Atlantic democracies, the 1988 Brazilian constitution calls for municipal popular participation in areas such as health provision and planning.Footnote 19
Whereas most comparative political studies focus upon whole nations, understanding urban developments such as these calls for subnational comparisons. One contribution of these books is to advance this budding approach to comparative politics by demonstrating its power.Footnote 20 The three books that focus upon Brazil all construct careful subnational comparisons across cities. These subnational comparisons allow the investigators to tease out differences in the institutional designs within a family of participatory governance innovations, to trace the differential consequences of reform for politics and for civil society, and to identify the causes and conditions for successful participatory governance. Those who seek to understand urban governance more broadly will benefit from the within-country urban natural experiments that these books utilize.
A Big Bang: Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre
Although the 1988 Brazilian Constitution mandated substantial local participation, robust institutions and practices of participatory governance did not come ultimately from national mandates, but rather from the ingenuity and self-interest of leftist political entrepreneurs. Their breakthrough occurred in Porto Alegre, the capital city of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. Out of both intrinsic ideological commitment and a desire to solidify the support of organizations in civil society, which sought greater influence over local policy, the leftist Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) developed participatory budgeting (PB) as an institutional and policy measure. The PT narrowly won Porto Alegre's mayoral elections in 1988 and subsequently implemented PB.Footnote 21
PB is a practice that engages ordinary citizens in the allocation of municipal investments.Footnote 22 As it was first implemented in Porto Alegre, PB occurs in several distinct stages that are spread over an annual cycle. The city is divided into regions, and each region into neighborhoods. In a first round of neighborhood meetings, which usually runs from March to June, participants discuss their priorities, past projects, and possible public works that might be funded. They elect representatives who argue for their priorities at higher-level regional meetings. At a second round of neighborhood and regional meetings, running between July and November, participants debate the merits of various proposals, vote on the public works to be implemented, constitute monitoring committees, and elect delegates to a citywide Municipal Budget Council. That council oversees the implementation of PB and approves the final budget, which is then submitted to the City Council.
It would be wrong to describe participatory budgeting as a pure process of direct democracy. PB combines both participatory and representative elements: Citizens who participate in neighborhood forums also elect representatives to argue for their priorities in regional and citywide forums. However, it would also be a mistake to think of participatory budgeting as a representative process in the way that, say, electing a mayor or city councillor is representative. Participants in the neighborhood forums of participatory budgeting do not just vote on who should represent their interests, but they also discuss, argue, and vote on their own specific projects and priorities.
Brazilian cities divide their budgets between maintenance (keeping streets, sewage, and water systems in order) and investments. Investments are divided, in turn, between personnel and infrastructure. In cities with participatory budgeting, some portion of the infrastructure investment budget is allocated to PB. In Porto Alegre, that portion is quite high. Between 1996 and 2003, almost US $400 million was allocated to various projects in Porto Alegre through participatory budgeting.Footnote 23 As a proportion of Porto Alegre's total city budget in any given year, between 4% and 21% is decided through the process of participatory budgeting.Footnote 24
Thanks to a first generation of scholarship from Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Leonardo Avritzer, Boaventura de Souza Santos, William Nylen, Rebecca Abers, and others, quite a bit is known about Porto Alegre, the patient zero of participatory budgeting.Footnote 25 We know, for example, that only a few thousand people participated in the process in its first year, but that an average of 35,000 participated annually between 2000 and 2003.Footnote 26 Breaking with the ubiquitous pattern that the well-off more frequently participate in politics, the profile of PB participants closely resembles that of the city's general population.Footnote 27 Regarding outcomes, participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre seems to have increased the proportion of public investments allocated to poor areas, improved the quality of public works,Footnote 28 and decreased the frequency of clientelistic exchanges between citizens and politicians.Footnote 29 Furthermore, participatory budgeting has been a political success. Running in part as the party that invented PB, the PT held Porto Alegre's mayoralty continuously from 1986 until 2005.Footnote 30
This first generation of scholarship has also converged upon certain conditions as important for the success of participatory budgeting. Baiocchi, Patrick Heller, and Marcelo Silva write that “[t]he literature has come to a near-consensus that the right combination of a capacitated civil society and a committed executive branch is the most auspicious context to institute Participatory Budgeting.”Footnote 31
Successful participatory budgeting requires a special kind of commitment from both politicians and civil society organizations (CSOs). Politicians must champion a program in which they cede control over significant budget allocations to a process of participatory decision making. Civil society organizations must seize that decision-making process as a political opportunity to advance their own priorities for development and public services. Those organizations operate with a dual consciousness in which they collaborate with politicians in making participatory budgeting at the same time that they employ contentious and adversarial strategies to discipline politicians who betray their commitments to PB.Footnote 32
These inspirational, practical, and political benefits of PB were not lost on politicians in other Brazilian cities. Although its form and substance varies widely, PB has spread rapidly to more than 200 cities across the country (see Table 1). In the early years, almost all of these programs were sponsored by the left party that invented it in Porto Alegre, the PT. Although the PT still sponsors the majority of PB programs, other parties have sponsored between 35% and 40% of participatory budgeting efforts.
Total number of participatory budgeting programs in Brazil
Source: Wampler and Avritzer 2005 and Reference Wampler and Avritzer2008.
Beyond the academic domains of comparative politics and Latin American studies, the significance of the Porto Alegre participatory budgeting experience for the theory of participatory democracy cannot be overstated. In the contemporary era, participatory democracy has been a theory looking for a practice and an institutional form. Contemporary participatory democracy has been a bit like the quark: a theory without much empirical confirmation. Although the quark particle was proposed to exist by theoretical physicists in 1964, empirical evidence for the first quark was not found until 1968, and the sixth (and final) flavor of quark was not empirically observed until 1995.Footnote 33
The literature is replete with isolated examples of participatory governance—in US cities during the war on poverty,Footnote 34 worker managed enterprises and cooperatives,Footnote 35 New England town meetings,Footnote 36 public agencies,Footnote 37 and citizen assemblies.Footnote 38 For the most part, however, these efforts have been small in scale, involving dozens or hundreds rather than tens or hundreds of thousands. Many of them also seem idiosyncratic—limited to a place or region and therefore seemingly dependent for their very existence upon quite specific sociopolitical conditions—and therefore easily dismissed as anomalous outliers. Participatory budgeting is perhaps the most widespread and authoritative institutionalization of participatory democratic ideas anywhere in the world.
Four Logics of Inquiry for Four Questions
The four books by Wampler; Avritzer; Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva; and Andrew Selee and Enrique Peruzzotti build upon this first generation of participatory budgeting scholarship by asking new questions that require new approaches. Whereas the initial research employed single-case studies to examine the mechanisms of PB in a particular place, these four volumes all use comparative case studies of participatory governance. As if by design, each volume's central questions and answers complement those of the others:
• Wampler examines eight cities to understand the performance of participatory budgeting under different social and political conditions. He concludes that the success of participatory budgeting depends upon contentious civil society organizations and the incentives for politicians to delegate authority to them.
• Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva construct five matched pairs of cities to understand whether similar cities are better or worse-off for having adopted participatory budgeting. In all but one of their pairs, social and political outcomes in cities that adopted participatory budgeting were clearly superior to those in matched cities.
• Avritzer explores the performance of different participatory governance schemes in four cities. He considers not just participatory budgeting but also health councils and requirements for ratifying urban development plans. His study thus includes both sociopolitical conditions and institutional designs for participation. He concludes that PB is not for everyone. In particular, popular participation in cities that lack robust civil society organizations or politicians committed to a participatory project may be better served by governance designs that are less civically demanding than PB.Footnote 39
• The edited collection from Selee and Peruzzotti looks outside Brazil to other Latin American countries to explore how well participatory institutions travel. Although participatory governance schemes in Bolivia, Argentina, Mexico, and Chile have not produced the dramatic gains of Porto Alegre, some have nevertheless reduced clientelistic relationships, expanded political inclusion, and fostered public deliberation.
The first three books provide a formidable array of urban cases—22 studies in all—scattered across Brazil (see Figure 1). Considered together, these case studies reveal the consequences of varied urban participatory institutions across a very wide range of spatial, social, and political circumstances.
Locations of 22 case studies in three books: Wampler, Participatory Budgeting in Brazil; Avritzer, Participatory Institutions in Democratic Brazil; and Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva, Bootstrapping Democracy.
Political Will
In Brazilian cities, participatory budgeting is always an executive initiative. Its adoption and implementation depends upon the level of a mayor's commitment and the extent to which political and economic constraints enable him or her to make good on that commitment. But why would any mayor commit to delegating the authority to allocate large sums from city coffers to a directly democratic process in the first place? We ordinarily think of municipal executives as jealous guardians of their own prerogatives and resources. The commitment of successful politicians to participatory democracy is, for now, one way in which Brazil is exceptional.
Part of the answer lies in the political project and ideology of the PT. In an excellent chapter on changes in Brazil's political society since the dictatorship, Avritzer explains how the PT originated as a mass party opposed to both left- and right-wing dirigiste projects that, if realized, would have subordinated society to the needs of a developmental state. Opposed to this state-heavy vision, the PT was a vehicle for groups in civil society—in particular labor and Catholic social movements—to make claims against the state. From the 1980s, Avritzer writes, the PT was marked by two complementary commitments: “the critique of clientelism and the adoption of participatory democracy.”Footnote 40
Yet Robert Michels famously showed long ago, a commitment to participatory democracy is very different from realizing participation in practice.Footnote 41 Ideological commitment may be necessary, but it is far from sufficient. While it is easy to believe that participatory reform is unlikely without deep, even intrinsic, commitment from political agents, that commitment is easily curbed or reversed by political competition, performance imperatives, and structural constraints.
Wampler untangles the political and social factors that explain the connection between executive commitment and the success of participatory budgeting. His book's chapters are organized into groups of cities and according to their success. Porto Alegre and Ipatinga have the most successful participatory budgeting programs, Belo Horizonte and Recife after that, Sao Paulo and Santo Andre somewhat less successful, and Blumenau and Rio Claro unsuccessful altogether.
How do we know whether PB succeeded? Wampler draws upon both quantitative survey evidence and his own observational case studies. Distinctively, he assesses the success of PB by asking informed observers. In 2003, he worked with the Instituto Ethos de Pesquisa to survey 695 PB delegates from his eight cities (randomly selected from 8,000 possible participants) about their experiences and views of PB.
Recall that PB delegates are citizens elected in neighborhood meetings to represent their communities in successive stages of the PB process. Compared to the general population, these civic activists are much more involved in participatory budgeting and much more knowledgeable about it. Unsurprisingly, survey respondents are civic activists; 85% report being active in a civil society organization, compared to figures ranging between 5% and 20% for the general population. More surprising, however, is that delegates come from Brazil's lower classes: 65% live in households earning less than US $400 per month and 51% did not complete high school. Wampler concludes that “when authority is transferred to the PB, it is transferred to lower-class individuals, who have long been marginalized in policymaking venues.”Footnote 42
Wampler's comparative analysis relies most heavily upon a battery of questions that asks delegates whether they exercise authority in the PB process. PB initiatives are more successful when more delegates respond that they have the authority to “make PB rules,” “define PB priorities,” “define projects,” “add resources,” “stop government projects,” and “monitor government projects.” In order to assess the extent to which PB has displaced clientelism with a more democratic and deliberative politics, the survey also asks delegates about the extent to which they use PB to secure their desired policy outcomes compared to more traditional approaches, such as individual connections and political pressure.
Wampler reckons the success of PB primarily according to the extent to which resources are allocated and projects implemented through that institution. Other measures are possible—such as the extent to which PB is a more legitimate institution compared to the prior representative electoral arrangements, as well as the success of PB in delivering improvements in planning, social services, public goods, or economic development. Even with PB empowerment as the main measure of success, delegates may, on the whole, be more favorably disposed to PB because they are, by definition, highly invested in the process. Wampler does not address whether his survey creates an unjustifiably positive assessment of PB. The survey does, however, reveal very significant differences among the cities that he examined. In Ipatinga, for example, 75% of delegates surveyed responded that they had the “authority to define PB priorities” and 70% thought that they possessed the “authority to monitor government projects.”Footnote 43 In Rio Claro, the corresponding responses are 10% for defining PB priorities and 43% for monitoring government projects.Footnote 44
Wampler's direct observations and interviews help him to identify the political and institutional practices that explain these sharp differences in perceptions of empowerment and authority among PB delegates in different cities. The mayor of Blumenau (one of the two weakest PB cities), for example, allocated a low percentage of the budget to PB and failed to follow through on many of the commitments that were made.Footnote 45 In São Paolo (a weak PB city, but not in the weakest category), there was a financial commitment to PB, but many of the projects seem to have been determined by the mayor's office and city agencies, rather than through PB's intended deliberative and participatory processes.Footnote 46 In Ipatinga (one of the two strongest PB cities), by contrast, the city government created an online Web-based system for citizens to enter their PB priorities and installed access points in clinics, schools, and shopping malls. The mayor of Ipatinga also allocated substantial funding to the PB and implemented most of the projects that the PB produced.Footnote 47
Wampler agrees with the first generation of PB scholarship that executive commitment explains the success of PB. But what explains why some mayors are more committed than others? There are two considerations at work. First is party affiliation and ideology. By the 1990s, participatory budgeting had become the PT “way of governing” in cities, and many PT mayors had committed to implement some form of PB. Through a kind of institutional isomorphism, PT mayors spread participatory budgeting throughout Brazilian cities. Second, and critically, this isomorphism was only partial. The reality of PB and extent of mayoral commitment has been highly varied. Wampler explains this variation by focusing upon mayors' political calculus.
Mayors commit their resources and political capital to participatory budgeting when doing so strengthens their political support against potential challengers. Mayors who depend for their political survival upon organizations and constituents who want participatory budgeting—as the mayors in Porto Alegre, Ipatinga, and to an extent Belo Horizonte and Recife did—build a robust PB. Where the components of a mayor's political base are not interested in participatory governance, mayors allocate fewer resources and authority to participatory budgeting. Tepidness comes in many flavors. In Blumenau, for example, rival civil society organizations have captured the PB process, and so extending it would strengthen political opponents.Footnote 48 In other cities, mayors are elected because they favor more traditional reform strategies that do not rely upon popular participation.Footnote 49
Wampler focuses upon the strength, autonomy, and participatory orientation of civil society organizations as a second principal factor that explains the success of PB. Civil society organizations make participatory budgeting work in at least two ways. First, leaders of these organizations participate in PB and mobilize others to participate. Strong CSOs increase the quantity of participation in PB, heighten the level of discourse and contention around projects and priorities, and check the implementation of projects by city government. Second, strong and independent CSOs can press mayors and other politicians to adopt forms of PB that are well resourced and that confer power onto participants. Wampler rightly stresses that CSOs must have the independence and wherewithal to practice contentious politics and to mobilize opposition to politicians who fail to implement robust forms of participatory budgeting.
In his examination of the role of civil society in these eight cities, Wampler makes a major contribution by illuminating the composition of civil society organizations that advance participatory democratic institutions. The sheer number or density of civic groups does not by itself favor the success of participatory budgeting. Instead, CSOs not only must be strong but also political in a certain way. CSOs with conventional institutional orientations—either those that seek to advance their interests through top-down state policiesFootnote 50 or to secure goods through personal connections—do not advance participatory budgeting. Instead, PB requires CSOs that seek participatory public institutions because they believe that mobilized civic action in those institutions will produce the public goods—and the sort of democratic politics—that they desire. Beyond this institutional orientation, the success of PB also requires politically independent CSOs. It is not enough for these organizations to favor participatory forms of government; CSOs must be autonomous rather than captured creatures of a political party—even a party that favors more participation.
One important and difficult question remains. Why do some CSOs favor participatory institutions while many others in Brazil and elsewhere in the world do not? As Wampler, Avritzer, and others discuss, part of the answer lies in the particular antistatist and cooperative history of these organizations and movements. I suspect, however, that part of the answer also lies in the peculiar demonstration effect of the cities that pioneered successful instances of participatory budgeting. These early cases showed that civil society organizations could secure public goods for their socially disadvantaged members and constituents through participatory institutions. Porto Alegre and other early experiences taught CSOs that there is a feasible alternative to the politics of clientelism and conventional advocacy.
Democracy and Civic Reconstruction
Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva flip the direction of the causal arrow linking civil society and participatory budgeting. Whereas Wampler explains robustness of participatory budgeting as a function of the character of civil society, Baiocchi and his colleagues examine the consequences of participatory budgeting, with a particular eye to its effects on civil society. These authors argue that participatory budgeting can strengthen civil society where it is weak. A high density of contentious civil society organizations oriented toward participatory institutions is good for participatory budgeting. That high density, however, is not strictly necessary. They contend that, ceteris paribus, a place is better-off with participatory budgeting than without it. As the title of their book indicates, participatory democratic institutions can help to develop an important foundation of their own success: citizens who are mobilized and organized into civic associations.
Because its fieldwork was less ambitious, Bootstrapping Democracy lacks the qualitative richness of Wampler's Participatory Budgeting in Brazil. Footnote 51 However, it does deploy a novel and elegant comparative strategy to isolate the effects of participatory budgeting. The authors construct a natural experiment in which five cities that adopted participatory budgeting are matched with five that did not. These 10 cities come from a larger group with similar 1996 electoral outcomes. In five of them, the PT won by a small margin and PB was adopted as a result. In the other five, the PT lost by a small margin and the city did not adopt PB. Such close electoral outcomes are associated with similar levels of left political strength and civil society organization in all 10 cities. In addition, the five pairs (PB vs. no PB) were selected so that cities within each pair are located close to each other and are similar in population size. Thus, the authors try to control for economic, political, and social context while varying an institutional “treatment”: the introduction of PB.Footnote 52
Although many kinds of outcomes are claimed for participatory budgeting, Baiocchi and his colleagues are primarily interested in this institutional treatment's effects on the character of civil society and the resulting relationships between state and civil society. Theoretically and empirically, this book breaks new ground in debates about civil society and democracy. On many accounts of democratic society, civil society should operate autonomously and at arm's length from government lest civic organizations be colonized and co-opted by the state.Footnote 53 Empirically, an enormous amount of attention has been paid to the count, or density, of civic organizations as the way to measure the presence of “social capital.”Footnote 54
Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva specify a more nuanced “dependent variable” that is constructed by specifying the relationship between civil society and the state. Their relational conception of civil society highlights two dimensions. The first dimension concerns “self-organization”: Is civil society autonomous from or dependent upon the state? Labor unions in the People's Republic of China, for example, are highly dependent on civil society organizations because their operations, agendas, and very existence are highly regulated by government. The second dimension describes how these civil society organizations generally make demands upon the state. They specify three levels of “demand making.” When civil society organizations are “excluded” from the arena of public contention and claim making, governments do not take their priorities into account at all. In “discretionary” modes of demand making, civil society actors satisfy their demands through the goodwill of brokers and patrons—as in clientelist arrangements. When civil society demand making is “institutionalized,” the procedures of public contestation over priorities and resources is “rule-bound, regularized, and transparent.”Footnote 55 These two dimensions of self-organization and demand making produce six configurations of governance, the top four of which are types of democracy with adjectives, as shown in Table 2.
Civil Society State Relations
Source: Reproduced from Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva, Bootstrapping Democracy, p. 35.
In Brazil, the transition from dictatorship marked a transition of governance regime from the authoritarian type in the lower right to a range of local governance regimes located in the second row. The authors write that in the discretionary row, “the cells labeled prostrate and bifurcated describe more or less what is the modal condition in most of the developing world.”Footnote 56 In prostrate democracy, civil society organizations are so weak and reliant on officialdom that they cannot mount independent challenges or make substantial demands at all.Footnote 57 In a prostrate democracy, civil society organizations secure public goods from the state only as favors, by engaging in clientelistic relationships. This is the most common relationship between state and civil society in posttransition Latin America. In bifurcated democracy, civil society organizations are sufficiently strong and independent that they can occasionally secure their goods and policies from the state by engaging it as clients, or they can choose to remain independent and challenge the state. The authors write that this bifurcated condition describes many areas of Brazil that have traditions of civic organization and popular mobilization.Footnote 58
The authors successfully map their city-level case studies onto this elegant relational decomposition of civil society. Of the eight cases that they analyze, four begin as instances of prostrate democracy, three as bifurcated democracy, and one case of mobilized democracy.Footnote 59 Over the course of their three-year study, from 1997 to 2000, all of the cases that experienced the “treatment” of participatory budgeting saw substantial shifts in the character of state–civil society relations, but such shifts were absent in the “control” cities.Footnote 60
Two of the cities where participatory budgeting was introduced—Camaragibe and Gravati—shifted upward from the prostrate to the affirmative democracy cell. Civic organizations in both cities were weak compared to, for example, Porto Alegre's energetic social movements. Against this civic history, the introduction of participatory budgeting institutions created one of the few spaces for citizens and civic organizations to articulate public priorities and to make claims. Participation in PB, especially in Gravati, was reasonably high, and PB allowed many interests and individuals that had been politically marginal to engage in urban politics. Nevertheless, these cases are located in the left column of Table 2 because the PB process and civic participation in it remains driven by state actors. Even at the end of the study period, these cities lack what Wampler calls independent and contentious civic organizations. Although they are better-off with PB than without it, the participatory reforms of Camargibe and Gravati did not midwife robustly independent civic organizations.
João Monlevade, a city in Minas Gerais, was the most successful of the treatment cases. Even before 1997, civil society organizations in João Monlevade were very assertive and played an important role in aggregating public demands. The introduction of PB amplified and structured these civil society relationships. In the schema of Table 2, João Monlevade began as a case of bifurcated democracy and moved to mobilized democracy. The fourth treatment case was the only ambiguous result of the four discussed by the authors. Before the introduction of PB in 1997, civil society organizations in Mauá were relatively robust; they organized autonomously and deployed a range of strategies that included contention. Mauá adopted a form of PB that was rather consultative. It was well received because participation rates were high and it formalized the arena of public demand making. However, the authors judged that one overall effect of PB was to demobilize civic organizations as they channeled their demands through the formal process, while losing the capacity to check government through oppositional tactics.Footnote 61 Thus, the quality of democratic governance in Mauá improves as a result of PB because the character of demand making moves from discretionary to institutionalized, but civil society itself, which was previously autonomous, becomes dependent on the state.
Bootstrapping Democracy thus argues powerfully, empirically, and conceptually for the democratic benefits of participatory budgeting even (perhaps especially) under civic and political circumstances that are less than fully favorable. Still, there are several limitations of this book that stem from its framing and categories. Perhaps out of the desire to limit conceptual complexity, the two-dimensional characterization of state–civil society relationships leaves out two critical considerations. First, the most desirable category of “institutionalized” demand making encompasses too many different kinds of pluralism, too many varieties of polyarchy, in Dahl's terms.Footnote 62 The push and pull of interest groups in Washington, DC, is one form of highly institutionalized demand making that is rule bound and highly structured, if not always transparent, as is European neocorporatism.Footnote 63 At least in the most successful forms of participatory budgeting, its novelty and significance lie in its distinctive structuring of relationships among the state, civil society organizations, and citizens. It shifts the balance of authority in some venues away from professional politicians who inhabit the state apparatus to civic organizations and citizens themselves.
The second, and related, central schema should attend explicitly to the hierarchical nature of civic organizations: Are they relatively flat and open or is the agenda tightly controlled from the top? The structure of civic groups is in part a function of their relationship to institutionalized political opportunities, such as the participatory budget. By creating incentives for popular mobilization, some variants of PB stimulate civic groups to be more inclusive than they would otherwise be. Absent such structural incentives, hierarchical and relatively exclusionary civic organizations could populate the institutionalized/autonomous cell of the schema in Table 2 in some city and yet leave much to be desired, democratically speaking.
Some critics might argue that Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva, in their experiment examining the effect of participatory budgeting on different cities, made the case too easy for themselves by focusing on civil society. Participatory budgeting is intended in large measure to incorporate civil society organizations into politics, and so we might expect its principal effects to register in the character of civil society. Political actors in the “control” cities may well have had other laudable priorities, such as economic development, social welfare, or efficient public goods provision. The careful paired-study methodology of Baiocchi and his colleagues offers a rich opportunity to study the effects of participatory budgeting on these other potential outcomes, but Bootstrapping Democracy does not exploit that opportunity.
Despite that criticism, setting out to change civil society is one thing, and actually changing it quite another. The main achievement of this book is to demonstrate that the institutionalization of participatory budgeting has salutary effects on the nexus between state and civil society. This important advance answers two important questions. First, must we treat the character of civil society as given, and design democratic institutions according to the kind of civil society that history has bequeathed someplace? Second, must the relationship between civil society and the state be loosely coupled to guard against colonization and co-optation? Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva answer both of these questions negatively and so challenge common wisdoms. Political institutions such as participatory budgeting can “bootstrap” communities into more robust forms of civil society and create a closely coupled, virtuous, democratic cycle between civil society and the state.
Institutional Tool Kits, Not Blueprints
The three books that focus on Brazil all stress that participatory institutions are highly variable. Participatory budgeting in any particular city assembles pieces from a tool kit of design elements, rather than simply reproducing the Porto Alegre blueprint.Footnote 64 Some forms of PB are more consultative than empowered. In Porto Alegre, the projects and priorities that result from PB are determined through citizen participation, but in other cities the agenda and many proposals come from officials. In Participatory Institutions in Democratic Brazil, Avritzer attends not only to variations within PB but to other, less studied, forms of citizen participation as well. Whereas Wampler and Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva examine the consequences of PB under different conditions, Avritzer's analysis varies both background conditions and institutional designs. In his 3 × 4 study, he examines three different participatory schemes—participatory budgeting, health councils, and urban master-plan ratification processes—in four cities: Porto Alegre, Belo Horiztonte, São Paolo, and Salvador.
Avritzer selects these cities because political and social conditions vary greatly in the extent to which they favor the success of participatory democracy. Of the four, Porto Alegre offers the most favorable conditions for the success of participatory institutions because it has dense and independent civic organizations and a left party with participatory traditions. Belo Horizonte is slightly less favorable because it has strong civic traditions but political parties there are somewhat more ambivalent regarding popular participation. With strong civic organizations only in some sectors of the city, and several PT administrations that have been quite skeptical of participation, Sāo Paolo ranks third. Salvador ranks last; its civic organizations are weak, especially in poor sections of the city, and political leaders have been hostile to participation.Footnote 65
Avritzer's findings are consistent with Wampler's study. These political and civic conditions matter for the success of participatory budgeting, and they matter in the expected directions. PB was most successful in Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte, less successful in Sāo Paolo, and a failure in Salvador. Avritzer's novel finding, however, is that different participatory designs—he explores health councils and city planning—can flourish even under unfavorable conditions because they demand less from political leaders and civil society organizations.
The 1988 Brazilian Constitution and subsequent legislation created a right to health care, decentralized much of the provision of that care to cities, and required cities to establish health councils to govern many aspects of the health-care system. Although they vary because each city implements the requirement in its own way, a city's health council is typically composed of sectoral representatives from health professionals, government, health-care providers and users of health services. Health councils are often responsible for setting systemwide priorities and managing funds. Councils also organize regular public meetings.Footnote 66 More than 5,000 health councils were formed in the 1990s, and 98% of Brazilian cities have health councils.Footnote 67
Whereas participatory budgeting is strongly “bottom-up” due to its components of direct citizen participation, Avrizter distinguishes the specific character of health councils as “power sharing” because government negotiates (or deliberates) about health-care policy and administration with representatives of providers, professionals, and users in an ongoing way.Footnote 68 Health councils are designed to mediate interests through sectoral or interest representation. They are consistent with proposals from Paul Hirst and Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers for associative democracy: political arrangements in which associations participate in the formation and implementation of policy in ways that enhance political equality, social justice, and effective governance.Footnote 69 Because associative, power-sharing designs do not require civic organizations or city government to mobilize citizens to participate directly, they are less taxing upon social and political capital than is participatory budgeting. In Avritzer's assessment, the health council systems worked best in Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte, the cities with the most favorable conditions for participatory governance. From a democratic vantage, he regards São Paolo's health councils as somewhat less successful because decision making there was less deliberative and more contentious. Still, the health councils in São Paolo succeeded in providing a high level of service and increasing access to health care in poor areas.Footnote 70 The Salvador health council failed because political forces hostile to participation relegated it to an advisory status and limited participation among civil society groups.Footnote 71
In a third scheme of participation, Brazilian cities are required to produce master plans for urban development, and requirements for ratification include public consultation. As with the health councils, each city elaborates its own consultation process. It is important to note that courts can nullify a city's plans if they find that the approval process fails to meet legal requirements for public consultation. Avrizer calls this third scheme a kind of “ratification” process. The role of the public is to approve of policies developed by government, rather than to participate in the formulation of policies.Footnote 72
Unlike in bottom-up or power-sharing designs, public actors need not mobilize nor develop policies; they only vet and signal their approval. Civil society organizations, moreover, need not mobilize popular support to defend this right to participate. Because cities are required by law to administer a proper ratification process, courts can intervene to vindicate residents whose participation rights are violated. Avritzer therefore argues that ratification designs enable a modicum of public influence even under political and social circumstances that are inhospitable to participatory governance. His case studies bear this out. In Salvador, the master plan was developed largely to suit real estate interests and without significant input from civil society groups or review by public audiences generally. At the behest of excluded civic organizations, the Brazilian courts invalidated Salvador's master plan in 2003 because it failed to meet public participation requirements. The subsequent planning process provided greater opportunities for public engagement.Footnote 73
Avritzer's central argument, then, is that designs for participation should be tailored to fit particular circumstances. Rather than attempting to implement a single blueprint, such as the Porto Alegre version of PB, policymakers and advocates should build schemes of participation that will flourish under particular political and social constraints. In places like Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte, where many civic society organizations and dominant political actors favor public participation, all three kinds of participatory designs—bottom-up, power sharing, and ratification—work well. Moderately favorable conditions, such as those found in São Paolo where civic organizations are not as strong and political actors more ambivalent about participation, can support successful power-sharing designs (such as health councils) but not the more demanding bottom-up schemes. Finally, where civic organizations are weak and political actors hostile, such as Salvador, only the minimal scheme of ratification is appropriate.
Participatory Institutions in Democratic Brazil is an important contribution to the debate about participatory democracy generally, and to participation in Brazil specifically. From the perspective of a participatory democrat, few communities are as fortunate as Porto Alegre. Avritzer directs our attention to institutional designs for participation that may well turn out to be of greater relevance because they are more broadly applicable. He illuminates how participatory democracy can work for the rest of us.
Avritzer's argument, however, is incomplete when juxtaposed against the method and findings of Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva. What if Avrizter had examined the appropriate counterfactuals? What would have happened in cities like Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, São Paolo, and Salvador that did not adopt these participatory schemes? Avritzer (and Wampler) show us that any participatory design fares better when circumstances are more favorable. This stands to reason. But are places that lack those favorable conditions better-off, and how much better-off, for having one participatory design, for instance power-sharing health councils, rather than for having a more demanding design like participatory budgeting? Avritzer suggests that those places should limit their ambitions, democratically speaking, to schemes that demand less from politicians and civic organizations. The Salvadors of the world should aim for ratification designs, rather than bottom-up schemes like participatory budgeting. Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva might well argue that even Salvador would be better-off with participatory budgeting because that design will help to create more favorable civic circumstances in the future.
As much as these three books tell us about participatory democracy in Brazil, settling this dispute requires, as they say, further study. In particular, it would require a design that combines Avritzer's cross-sectional comparison of different participatory designs with an approach, such as the natural experiment if Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva that regards each design as a treatment paired with a control community in which there is no effort to institute participatory governance.
Brazilian Exceptionalism or a Model for the Rest of Us?
For those of us who neither live in Brazil nor focus our scholarly attention on it, the tantalizing question is whether the forms of participation that have flourished there in recent decades can move to other societies. Or does something so special about Brazil make its practices of participatory democracy interesting but unavailable to us? The collection edited by Selee and Peruzzotti begins to answer this question. Participatory Innovation and Representative Democracy in Latin America is composed of essays that examine the politics and practices of participatory governance in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia, as well as in Brazil.
The authors of these essays do not identify any schemes of participatory democracy that are as sustained or ambitious as participation in places like Porto Alegre or Belo Horizonte. Rather than identifying fundamentally different dynamics outside of Brazil, these authors' findings about the determinants of successful participatory governance echo the comparative studies of Wampler, Avritzer, and Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva. Regarding geographic scale, for example, most of the participatory innovations in other Latin American countries seem to have emerged in cities as they have in Brazil.
Furthermore, successful participatory governance requires the support of political leaders. That support, furthermore, is as much a product of political self-interest as ideology or party program. For example, Aníbal Ibarra, the chief of government of Buenos Aires, implemented a program of participatory budgeting in 2002.Footnote 74 Though initially limited to only 16 neighborhoods, almost 5,000 residents participated. They identified some 338 projects of which, according to city records, 80% were implemented. Over the next two years, participatory budgeting came to encompass all neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. Fourteen thousand residents participated in PB in 2004, and 60% of the priorities they identified were implemented. After just three years, however, the program receded in scale and significance as political leaders favored other initiatives.
Peruzzotti explains why participatory budgeting in Buenos Aires was so ephemeral. Ibarra endorsed PB after a period of widespread popular protest and civic action against failing economic and social policies and the lack of political accountability. In this instance, PB was an elite strategy to win the allegiance of city residents and co-opt civic organizations. After the initial pressure from popular protest faded, absent civic pressure to maintain participatory institutions, politicians fell back on more conventional methods of incorporation and allocation that they could better control.Footnote 75 A lack of political commitment plagues the most successful participatory projects in other Latin American countries as well. Selee describes promising participatory experiences in the cities of Tijuana and Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl that did seem to intensify popular participation and reduce clientelism. Even in these positive cases, however, participatory practices are fragile and progress fitful because “the same parties that had implemented these innovative experiences of citizen participation then tried to undercut them.”Footnote 76 Similarly, Anny Rivera-Ottenberger finds very promising participatory governance initiatives in Chile.Footnote 77 Even in those cases, however, the political commitment to participation seems to depend upon political leaders who are exceptionally, perhaps idiosyncratically, committed to popular participation.
Beyond political commitment, scholars of participation in Brazil agree that its most robust instances of participatory reform depend on the existence of civil society organizations that are not only strong and encompassing but also committed to participatory governance itself as a method of making public decisions and allocating public goods. Many of the essays in Participatory Innovation and Representative Democracy in Latin America attend to the character of civil society—the tally of civic organizations, the sizes of their memberships, and their areas of concern. What is distinctive about some Brazilian civic organizations, however, is that they demand not just policies that benefit their members and constituents but also processes of participatory governance, as opposed to just momentarily advantageous political relationships, as the terrain of allocative decision making. Civil society that is not just robust and contentious but also participatory democratic in its orientation seems to be a missing ingredient in these other Latin American cases. Indeed, Roberto Laserna's essay on Bolivia describes many civic organizations that were ideologically opposed to what might otherwise have been a favorable legal and administrative environment for participatory governance.Footnote 78
Many years ago, I recall recoiling upon encountering Richard Rorty's essay, “Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future.”Footnote 79 In that piece, the great American social philosopher was trying to make sense of the democratic and egalitarian audaciousness of Brazilian intellectual Roberto Unger. Rorty suggested that American and European scholars and political reformers alike were stuck in tragic, backward-looking cycles of debate and political reform, while Unger, unencumbered by our particular political pretensions, charged forward.
Rorty suggested that we in the First World cannot “bootstrap” ourselves out of our democratic malaise as the Brazilians described by Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva did. What we need to shake us out of these democratic doldrums, he wrote, were bold ideas and political experiments from developing countries that explode the boundaries of our cramped, “advanced” capitalist democratic, political imaginations:
[T]he best any of us here in AlexandriaFootnote 80 can hope for is that somebody out there will do something to tear up the present system of imaginary significations within which politics in … the First and Second world is conducted. It need not be the equalization of incomes, but it has to be something like that—something so preposterously romantic as to be no longer discussed by us Alexandrians. Only some actual event, the actual success of some political move made in some actual country, is likely to help.Footnote 81
Surely, I thought, Americans must be as good at democratic innovation as anyone. But the books discussed here describe a vast range of ambitious and successful democratic reforms all over Brazil. There are simply no analogs of similar scale or depth in North America, Europe, Asia, or Africa. With prescience that I was incapable of acknowledging 20 years ago, maybe Rorty was right: Such democratic reform just could not have been made in America.
These books show us exactly why efforts to deepen democracy in America have been so feeble. All of these scholars agree that there are two critical ingredients to the success of democratic innovation in Latin America. Both of them are in short supply in the North. The first of these is political leadership that is committed to increasing the role of citizens in governing themselves. In Brazil, this leadership came from Workers' Party organizations in the cities. Ideology conspired with narrow political self-interest to make the PT champion of many flavors of participatory democracy, especially participatory budgeting, but also health councils and urban plan ratification. Such politicians—much less whole political parties—are very difficult to find in America and Europe. Our politicians are, by and large, electocrats who believe that they have the right to rule because they won the prior election.Footnote 82 The second critical ingredient is a civil society composed of associations that are not just independent, numerous, and inclusive but devoted to the proposition of participatory government. Unlike more familiar interest groups, such associations do not just fight for their preferred policies, but they also defend structures of popular participation. As with the PT, they do so because they believe that participatory governance best advances their members' long-term interests in social justice and political citizenship. Unlike familiar social movements, these associations do not simply maintain a decoupled relationship with government for fear of co-optation, but rather participate directly in the political structures that they help to create.
Although these two ingredients are seldom found together, we nevertheless see participatory and deliberative governance innovations sprouting up in unexpected places.Footnote 83 The British Columbia Citizens Assembly has become a celebrated case from Canada.Footnote 84 Even in the old cities of America, specifically in ChicagoFootnote 85 and New York, individual wards and districts are experimenting with participatory budgeting. Across Europe, in Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Germany, local and national governments are experimenting with structures like citizen juries and health councils to address challenges to legitimacy and effective governance.Footnote 86 Will such sprouts blossom or simply wither for want of fertile soil? If they do flower, it will result from a distinctive kind of bootstrapping in which efforts inspired by experiences such as Brazilian participatory budgeting begin in the realm of ideas and then develop the civic and political conditions necessary for them to continue.
In the realm of political imagination, participatory democracy has plenty of romance. Perhaps for that reason alone, we wizened North Americans seldom discuss it. But perhaps we should. As we consider the polarization, deadlock, cynicism, and outright corruption that infects the eighteenth-century machinery through which we try feebly to govern ourselves in the twenty-first, we would all do well to look beyond Alexandria. Those young scholars discussed here have somehow inoculated themselves from the dominant skepticism that sees democratic moves in developing countries as damaged reflections of the great accomplishments of the North Atlantic polities. With hope, but also with care and sobriety, they have written books that lay bare the causes, structures, accomplishments, and limitations of a remarkable set of institutional innovations in participatory democracy. In doing so, they offer democratic help we all need. We would do well to take it.
