The Politics of Local Participatory Democracy in Latin America: Institutions, Actors, and Interactions - Hardcover

Montambeault, Françoise

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804795169 ISBN 13: 9780804795166

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Participatory democracy innovations aimed at bringing citizens back into local governance processes are now at the core of the international democratic development agenda. Municipalities around the world have adopted local participatory mechanisms of various types in the last two decades, including participatory budgeting, the flagship Brazilian program, and participatory planning, as it is the case in several Mexican municipalities. Yet, institutionalized participatory mechanisms have had mixed results in practice at the municipal level. So why and how does success vary? This book sets out to answer that question.

Defining democratic success as a transformation of state-society relationships, the author goes beyond the clientelism/democracy dichotomy and reveals that four types of state-society relationships can be observed in practice: clientelism, disempowering co-option, fragmented inclusion, and democratic cooperation.

Using this typology, and drawing on the comparative case study of four cities in Mexico and Brazil, the book demonstrates that the level of democratic success is best explained by an approach that accounts for institutional design, structural conditions of mobilization, and the configurations, strategies, behaviors, and perceptions of both state and societal actors.

Thus, institutional change alone does not guarantee democratic success: the way these institutional changes are enacted by both political and social actors is even more important as it conditions the potential for an autonomous civil society to emerge and actively engage with the local state in the social construction of an inclusive citizenship.

About this title

About the Author

Françoise Montambeault is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Université de Montréal.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Politics of Local Participatory Democracy in Latin America

Institutions, Actors, and Interactions

By Françoise Montambeault

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9516-6

Contents

List of Abbreviations, 
Acknowledgments, 
1. Introduction, 
2. How Does Success Vary? Redefining Democratic Success, 
3. Why Do Cases Vary? A Comparative Approach, 
4. Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl: Participatory Democracy or Clientelistic Participation?, 
5. León: Participation as Fragmented Inclusion, 
6. Recife: From Clientelism to Disempowering Cooption, 
7. Belo Horizonte: The Route Toward Democratic Cooperation?, 
8. Conclusion: Comparative Lessons for Participatory Democracy Theory, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The health of a democracy may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens. — ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, 1840

After extensive debates regarding the challenges of democratic transitions in Latin America, scholars have more recently moved their attention to the quality of democratic governance in the region. Democracy, they suggest, is not simply a mode for selecting political leaders, but rather a more complex system of governance founded on the principle of liberty and sustained by an effective rule of law equally applied to all (Diamond 1999; O'Donnell 2005) that should also be evaluated according to the quality of its procedures, content, and results (Diamond and Morlino 2005). Evaluated against these criteria, Latin American electoral democracies reveal their flaws. Competitive and regular elections may today be "the only game in town" (Linz and Stepan 1996), but governance processes and policy results have been characterized by weak state accountability mechanisms (O'Donnell 1998) and a pervasive dynamic of social exclusion due to differentiated and unequal access to citizenship rights (Oxhorn 2003). The democratization challenge is therefore still alive in Latin America, a region characterized by the persistence of clientelistic relationships, whose exclusionary nature creates different classes of citizens, fosters inequality, and as such curtails the deepening of democracy.

In the face of these challenges, what can be done to deepen democratic practices, to transform state-society relationships at the core functioning of democratic institutions? The strengthening of an autonomously organized civil society able to make the state accountable is vital to this transformation, especially in contexts characterized by traditionally low levels of autonomous civic engagement. Inspired by the lessons of the literatures on civil society, participatory/deliberative democracy, and social capital, the idea of including ordinary citizens' participation in decision making through formal institutional mechanisms has become an important locus of the democratic development strategy in Latin America. Building on existing scholarship, this book asks and answers two questions: Can institutional change enhance the quality of democracy in Latin America? More broadly, to what extent can institutional reform foster the development of an autonomous civil society capable of contributing to better quality democracy?

The Politics of Local Participatory Democracy answers these questions by focusing on one particular type of institutional democratic innovation: local participatory governance mechanisms. Around the world, many local governments, from the political left to right, have recently adopted reforms to create institutions for participatory democracy. These reforms formally include ordinary citizens' input in decision-making processes at the local level — the level of government where most citizens' demands are formulated. The existence of a positive association between the creation of such public spaces and the deepening of democracy is thus generally assessed via two complementary angles: the empowerment thesis and the accountability and government responsiveness arguments.

Examples of local participatory institutions include participatory budgeting, urban planning citizen councils, citizen oversight councils, and so on. These innovations are often cited as institutional expressions of a will to construct public spaces for civil society to engage in the governance process, for state-society interactions to flourish, and for local governments to become more responsive to local needs. Although there is an important body of literature addressing the relationship between participatory democracy and the deepening of democracy, compelling evidence from cross-national comparisons that provide an insightful assessment of the sociopolitical conditions underlying "success" are still lacking. More important, there is no agreement on the meaning and indicators of success. How is the assumed democratization potential of participatory mechanisms actually realized in practice? Under what conditions is such institutional change likely to succeed? The book develops a conceptual and comparative framework to better understand democratic success for participatory democracy institutions, and a set of theoretical tools that can grasp the variety of empirical realities observed in practice, drawing from the comparative study of four cases of participatory democracy in two countries, Mexico and Brazil.

THE PROMISE OF LOCAL PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY IN MEXICO AND BRAZIL

Though they have had quite different experiences with authoritarianism and democratization, both Mexico and Brazil share important sociopolitical dynamics and have undergone a transition to democracy during the past two decades, leading to the rise of political pluralism, the opening of the local and national electoral arenas, and the possibility of party alternation in power. In 1985, Brazilians elected their first civilian president since 1964. Tancredo Neves, from the traditional opposition party Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (PMDB), was elected as a result of a pact negotiated between the military regime, the official pro-military party Aliança Renovadora Nacional (ARENA), and the opposition (PMDB) for the apertura (opening) of the regime and the return of power to civilians after twenty years of military rule. The transition to democracy culminated in 1988, with the adoption of the new Constitution of Brazil. Mexicans have had a quite different story of democratization. In 2000, an election ended the seventy-year reign of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) — this after twenty years of gradual opening of the regime through a series of electoral and constitutional reforms adopted by PRI in search of renewed legitimacy. In 2000, Mexicans elected Vicente Fox from the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), in a presidential election that would leave the PRI in third place (after the leftist Partido de Revolución Democrática or PRD).

While following different trajectories toward the adoption of democratic institutions, Mexico and Brazil are both characterized by the predominance of informal institutions, a set of unwritten rules that exist outside and alongside formal ones (Helmke and Levitsky 2006). Informal institutions, though unwritten, are known for having a significant influence on formal rules (O'Donnell 1996): they can reinforce, subvert, or even supersede them. Not only do they provide incentives and disincentives to comply with formal rules (Helmke and Levitsky 2006), but they also shape and constrain human behavior, as well as the nature of state-society interactions and democratic outcomes. Challenges to Mexican and Brazilian democratic regimes are, in fact, still very much linked to the prevalence and adaptation of clientelism to democratic institutions. More than a question of access to power through formal institutions, the quality of democracy depends on the exercise of power within those institutions (Mazzuca 2010), and on the capacity of institutional arrangements to curb clientelistic relationships between the state and society. Traditionally defined as a mode of interaction between politicians (patrons) and citizens (clients) that involves an unequal social exchange based on power and resources, clientelism is not static and could therefore survive a transition to democracy and adapt to the new context of competitive electoral politics. It can take differing forms and functions, and it can adapt to the new context of machine politics where parties become clientelistic machines (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1981; Roniger 1994). Here, traditional patron-client ties are incorporated into a broader institutional framework, usually the political parties (Lemarchand 1981). The exchange is, then, less understood in terms of a personal relationship between two individuals. It is, rather, defined by political parties and included within the activities of the elected governments, through targeted programs and policies that aim to secure the support of certain social groups. In post-transition Mexico, clientelism remained a strategy pursued by highly institutionalized political parties to gain or maintain political support among the population, most using their local social and political organization to bridge the gap between citizens and the party in view of securing votes (Shefner 2001; Hilgers 2008; Fox 1994). In Brazil, modern clientelism arose in the context of urbanization and changed the nature of client-patron relationships, also bringing them to the center of party politics and partisan-loyalty dynamics. Since 1985, clientelism has been used as a direct or indirect vote-buying strategy by local, state, and federal politicians seeking to maintain and extend their local support bases in a party system characterized by numerous political parties, changing loyalties, and the traditional weakness of popular organizations and mass-based parties (Mainwaring 1999).

As political pluralism rose in both countries, however, a new "democratization" discourse emerged among political parties, to which the idea of citizen participation became central. In democratization contexts, participatory democracy is indeed often assumed to potentially be "transformative," creating institutional spaces for state-society relationships to be redefined by democratic practices (Hickey and Mohan 2005; de Sousa Santos and Avritzer 2004). It is argued to have the potential to empower civil society from below (Fung and Wright 2003), bring traditionally marginalized citizens together with the state in the public sphere for them to negotiate their access to the rights of citizenship (Hagopian 2007), and strengthen state accountability mechanisms (Ackerman 2003; Avritzer 2002; Heller 2001; Goetz and Jenkins 2001; Manor 1999), creating formal and direct ties between the local state and participating civil society organizations (CSOs). To be effective, local participatory institutions should, however, follow certain fundamental principles (Harbers 2007; Goldfrank 2008; Fung and Wright 2003, 2001): (1) they need to be institutionalized, included in the "routine" of the local government's decision-making processes over specific and tangible public policy issues; (2) they must sustain and encourage face-to-face interaction and deliberation in public-sphere policy issues to generate solutions; and (3) although they are not necessarily located at the local level, they are often closely related to state decentralization processes.

Following these general principles, the design of the participatory reforms that were put forward in Mexico and Brazil is however different, given the countries' local histories of mobilization and the contrasting ways by which clientelism needed to be coped with. In Mexico, clientelism is often a partisan practice that needs to be curbed by long-term planning processes going beyond a party's or a mayor's three-year mandate. Consequently, the new form of participatory governance that has emerged at the local level revolves around the general issues of urban planning and urban development, with city-based citizen committees acting as the "voice" of the population to inform city hall's decision-making processes. In Brazil, budgeting has been an important tool for circumventing clientelistic resource distribution. In this case, participatory budgeting is thus the most important aspect of participatory democracy that has appeared with the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) in Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul) in 1988 and has since spread throughout the country and even beyond.

BEYOND THE HONEYMOON: UNDERSTANDING HOW AND WHY OUTCOMES VARY

If the conditions leading to implementation of institutionalized participatory democracy innovations and their diffusion across Latin America are now well documented, how their implementation transformed the state, civil society, and state-society interactions still needs to be further explored and explained both theoretically and empirically. Although studies of participatory democracy have flourished, many have undertaken single-case studies, which has generally led to an overoptimistic view of the democratization potential of such institutions (Abers 2000; Avritzer 2002; Fung and Wright 2003; Baiocchi 2005). As Avritzer rightfully said, the honeymoon seems to be over today, as scholarship enters a "post-celebratory phase" (Avritzer 2009b). Participatory institutions and mechanisms have spread around the world, but they are not a panacea against all of democracy's ills. They have had mixed results in practice at the municipal level, between countries but also between municipalities within a single country, as in Mexico and Brazil. Recent empirical studies have indeed observed that the gap between the normative expectations underlying the arguments linking social participation to democratization — assuming that citizens are willing to participate actively when given the opportunity — and the reality of actual citizen participation is quite significant (Cornwall and Coelho 2007). The empowerment thesis has been questioned, and it is yet not clear whether new associations and civic organizations have directly resulted from participatory innovations (Nylen 2002, 2003) or have increased their capacity to organize through the process (Baiocchi et al. 2011). Moreover, in many cases, old practices of clientelism are likely to coexist with the new practices introduced through the process (Garcia-Guadilla and Perez 2002; Wampler 2007; Montambeault 2012, 2011).

Comparative perspectives have thus led authors to become more cautious about the positive link between institutionalized participation and democratization. The dominant comparative approaches, however, remain limited as they do not provide a thorough comparative analysis of participatory institutions (Wampler and McNulty 2011). If, for instance, they compare cases with differing outcomes, they focus on either cases across countries (Avritzer 2002; Goldfrank 2011) or within countries (Wampler 2007; Avritzer 2009b; Baiocchi et al. 2011; Selee 2011), without combining both types of comparison. Moreover, there is a lack of consensus in scholarship over the definition of democratic success and its underlying conditions.

The Arguments

The first question the book addresses is therefore, How do we assess success? Taking a comprehensive approach to understanding democracy, it argues that democratic success should be measured by the extent to which participatory democracy has contributed to transforming (or not) state-society relationships at the local level. Because participatory institutions generate new forms of interactions between the state and citizens, the assumption is that the focus of this analysis should be on how the relationship between the state and civil society emerges and develops through formal and informal interactions in the participatory process. Such a redefinition of success not only assumes that it is not a given, but also allows that there might be different degrees of success. As the cases presented here exemplify, there are significant discrepancies among cases across Latin America. This suggests that the traditional dichotomy between clientelism and citizenship cannot sufficiently address the issue of state-society relationships. In fact, as Latin American countries have generally transitioned toward a democratic regime favoring pluralism, social relations are more complex than the reality this dualistic spectrum can capture. Thus, by redefining success, this book not only contributes to a better understanding of how participatory democracy affects policy-making processes and outcomes or the number of associations they create, but also of how it reshapes (or not) formal and informal practices of local democratic governance.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Politics of Local Participatory Democracy in Latin America by Françoise Montambeault. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804795169
• ISBN 13: 9780804795166
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288