New Institutions for Participatory Democracy in Latin America

New Institutions for Participatory Democracy in Latin America PDF Author: Kenneth E. Sharpe
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137270586
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
This volume describes and analyzes the proliferation of new mechanisms for participation in Latin American democracies and considers the relationship between direct participation and the consolidation of representative institutions based on more traditional electoral conceptions of democracy.

New Institutions for Participatory Democracy in Latin America

New Institutions for Participatory Democracy in Latin America PDF Author: Kenneth E. Sharpe
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137270586
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This volume describes and analyzes the proliferation of new mechanisms for participation in Latin American democracies and considers the relationship between direct participation and the consolidation of representative institutions based on more traditional electoral conceptions of democracy.

The Politics of Local Participatory Democracy in Latin America

The Politics of Local Participatory Democracy in Latin America PDF Author: Françoise Montambeault
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804796572
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
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.

Barrio Democracy in Latin America

Barrio Democracy in Latin America PDF Author: Eduardo Canel
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271037334
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The transition to democracy underway in Latin America since the 1980s has recently witnessed a resurgence of interest in experimenting with new forms of local governance emphasizing more participation by ordinary citizens. The hope is both to foster the spread of democracy and to improve equity in the distribution of resources. While participatory budgeting has been a favorite topic of many scholars studying this new phenomenon, there are many other types of ongoing experiments. In Barrio Democracy in Latin America, Eduardo Canel focuses our attention on the innovative participatory programs launched by the leftist government in Montevideo, Uruguay, in the early 1990s. Based on his extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Canel examines how local activists in three low-income neighborhoods in that city dealt with the opportunities and challenges of implementing democratic practices and building better relationships with sympathetic city officials.

The Two Faces of Institutional Innovation

The Two Faces of Institutional Innovation PDF Author: Leonardo Avritzer
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1786436655
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
This book evaluates democratic innovations to allow a full analysis of the different practices that have emerged recently in Latin America. These innovations, often viewed in a positive light by a large section of democratic theorists, engendered the idea that all innovations are democratic and all democratic innovations are able to foster citizenship – a view challenged by this work. The book also evaluates the expansion of innovation to the field of judicial institutions. It will benefit democratic theorists by presenting a realistic analysis of the positive and negative aspects of democratic innovation.

Building Participatory Institutions in Latin America

Building Participatory Institutions in Latin America PDF Author: Lindsay Mayka
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108576826
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
While prior studies have shown the importance of participatory institutions in strengthening civil society and in improving policy outcomes, we know much less about why some participatory institutions take root while others do not. This book explains the divergent trajectories of nationally mandated participatory institutions' 'stickiness' by highlighting the powerful and lasting impacts of their origins in different policy-reform projects. Mayka argues that participatory institutions take root when they are bundled into sweeping policy reforms, which upend the status quo and mobilize unexpected coalitions behind participatory institution building. In contrast, participatory institutions created through reforms focused on deepening democracy are easy for entrenched interests to dismantle and sideline. Building Participatory Institutions in Latin America draws on rich case studies of participatory institutions in Brazil and Colombia across three policy areas, offering the first cross-national comparative study of participatory institutions mandated at the national level.

Participatory Innovation and Representative Democracy in Latin America

Participatory Innovation and Representative Democracy in Latin America PDF Author: Andrew Selee
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9780801894077
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This empirically grounded collection examines the growth of participatory institutions in Latin American democracy and how such institutions affect representative government. While most existing literature concentrates on model cases of participatory budgeting in Brazil, this volume investigates cases in Mexico, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina, where conditions for innovation have been far less favorable. The contributors, while recognizing the important differences and potential clashes between participatory and representative forms of democracy, ultimately favor participation, emphasizing its capacity to enhance and strengthen representative democracy.

Popular Sovereignty and Constituent Power in Latin America

Popular Sovereignty and Constituent Power in Latin America PDF Author: Emelio Betances
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137548258
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
This book combines a bottom-up and top-down approach to the study of social movements in relationship to the development of constituent and constituted power in Latin America. The contributors to this volume argue that the radical transformation of liberal representative democracy into participative democracy is what colours these processes as revolutionary. The core themes include popular sovereignty, constituted power, constituent power, participatory democracy, free trade agreements, social citizenship, as well as redistribution and recognition issues. Unlike other collections, which provide broad coverage of social movements at the expense of depth, this book is of thematic focus and illuminates the relationships between rulers and ruled as they transform liberal democracy.

Deepening Local Democracy in Latin America

Deepening Local Democracy in Latin America PDF Author: Benjamin Goldfrank
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271056770
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
The resurgence of the Left in Latin America over the past decade has been so notable that it has been called “the Pink Tide.” In recent years, regimes with leftist leaders have risen to power in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela. What does this trend portend for the deepening of democracy in the region? Benjamin Goldfrank has been studying the development of participatory democracy in Latin America for many years, and this book represents the culmination of his empirical investigations in Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In order to understand why participatory democracy has succeeded better in some countries than in others, he examines the efforts in urban areas that have been undertaken in the cities of Porto Alegre, Montevideo, and Caracas. His findings suggest that success is related, most crucially, to how nationally centralized political authority is and how strongly institutionalized the opposition parties are in the local arenas.

Informal Institutions and Democracy

Informal Institutions and Democracy PDF Author: Gretchen Helmke
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801883514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
"The volume emerged out of two conferences on informal institutions. The first, entitled 'Informal Institutions and Politics in the Developing World, ' was held at Harvard University in April 2002 ... The second conference, entitled 'Informal Institutions and Politics in Latin America: Understanding the Rules of the Game, ' was held at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, in April 2003"--Pref

Voice and Inequality

Voice and Inequality PDF Author: Carew Boulding
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019754214X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
"How do poor people in Latin America participate in politics? What explains the variation in the patterns of voting, protesting, and contacting government for the region's poorest citizens? Why are participation gaps larger in some countries than in others? This book offers the first large scale empirical analysis of political participation in Latin America, focusing on patterns of participation among the poorest citizens in each country, and comparing those patterns to those of individuals with more resources. Far from being politically inert, under certain conditions the poorest citizens in Latin America can act and speak for themselves with an intensity that far exceeds their modest socioeconomic resources. We argue that key institutions of democracy, namely civil society, political parties, and competitive elections, have an enormous impact on whether or not poor people turn out to vote, protest, and contact government officials. When voluntary organizations thrive in poor communities and when political parties focus their mobilization efforts on poor individuals, they respond with high levels of political activism. Poor people's activism also benefits from strong parties, robust electoral competition and well-functioning democratic institutions. Where electoral competition is robust and where the power of incumbents is constrained, we see higher levels of participation by poor individuals and more political equality. Precisely because the individual resource constraints that poor people face are daunting obstacles to political activism, our explanation focuses on those features of democratic politics that create opportunities for participation that have the strongest effect on poor people's political behavior"--