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

Get Book Here

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.

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

Get Book Here

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

Get Book Here

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.

Deepening Local Democracy in Latin America

Deepening Local Democracy in Latin America PDF Author: Benjamin Goldfrank
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271074515
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Get Book Here

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.

Militants and Citizens

Militants and Citizens PDF Author: Gianpaolo Baiocchi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804751230
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
Brazil’s democracy has frequently been described as unconsolidated, its citizens as apathetic and uninterested in politics. But in Porto Alegre, a host city to the World Social Forum, thousands of ordinary citizens participate in local governance, making binding decisions on urban policy on a daily basis. While there has been immense attention paid to the practice of participatory democracy in Porto Alegre, this is the first book to examine the politics, culture, and day-to-day activities of its citizens. Drawing on the rich tradition of urban ethnography and political theory, the book argues that Porto Alegre’s importance may lie not just with its effective governance, but with its new political logic, namely a greater access to government functions and government officials for traditionally disenfranchised citizens. In an age characterized by seemingly strong voter apathy, this study has global implications. The author shows that in the discussions on the failings of democracy in industrialized countries like the United States, most people may be missing what is central to civic engagement--unimpeded access to government.

Inventing Local Democracy

Inventing Local Democracy PDF Author: Rebecca Abers
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
ISBN: 9781555878931
Category : Local government
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
Abers (political science, Center for Public Policy Research, U. of Brasília, Brazil) provides a close study of innovative city government in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Led by the Workers' Party, the city implemented a participatory budget program in which residents meet in their neighborhoods to determine budget priorities. Taking place in a city long dominated by patronage politics and elite rule, the story is both a sociopolitical study of the impact that state- sponsored participatory forums can have on civil society and a contribution to the theory and practical possibilities of participatory democracy.--

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: 9780801894060
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

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.

Building Participatory Institutions in Latin America

Building Participatory Institutions in Latin America PDF Author: Lindsay Mayka
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108470874
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explains how and why some national mandates for participatory policymaking develop into powerful institutions for citizen engagement.

Democracy in Latin America, 1760-1900

Democracy in Latin America, 1760-1900 PDF Author: Carlos A. Forment
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226257150
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 484

Get Book Here

Book Description
Carlos Forment's aim in this highly ambitious work is to write the book that Tocqueville would have written had he traveled to Latin America instead of the United States. Drawing on an astonishing level of research, Forment pored over countless newspapers, partisan pamphlets, tabloids, journals, private letters, and travelogues to show in this study how citizens of Latin America established strong democratic traditions in their countries through the practice of democracy in their everyday lives. This first volume of Democracy in Latin America considers the development of democratic life in Mexico and Peru from independence to the late 1890s. Forment traces the emergence of hundreds of political, economic, and civic associations run by citizens in both nations and shows how these organizations became models of and for democracy in the face of dictatorship and immense economic hardship. His is the first book to show the presence in Latin America of civic democracy, something that gave men and women in that region an alternative to market- and state-centered forms of life. In looking beneath institutions of government to uncover local and civil organizations in public life, Forment ultimately uncovers a tradition of edification and inculcation that shaped democratic practices in Latin America profoundly. This tradition, he reveals, was stronger in Mexico than in Peru, but its basic outlines were similar in both nations and included a unique form of what Forment calls Civic Catholicism in order to distinguish itself from civic republicanism, the dominant political model throughout the rest of the Western world.

The Inclusionary Turn in Latin American Democracies

The Inclusionary Turn in Latin American Democracies PDF Author: Diana Kapiszewski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110890159X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 587

Get Book Here

Book Description
Latin American states took dramatic steps toward greater inclusion during the late twentieth and early twenty-first Centuries. Bringing together an accomplished group of scholars, this volume examines this shift by introducing three dimensions of inclusion: official recognition of historically excluded groups, access to policymaking, and resource redistribution. Tracing the movement along these dimensions since the 1990s, the editors argue that the endurance of democratic politics, combined with longstanding social inequalities, create the impetus for inclusionary reforms. Diverse chapters explore how factors such as the role of partisanship and electoral clientelism, constitutional design, state capacity, social protest, populism, commodity rents, international diffusion, and historical legacies encouraged or inhibited inclusionary reform during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Featuring original empirical evidence and a strong theoretical framework, the book considers cross-national variation, delves into the surprising paradoxes of inclusion, and identifies the obstacles hindering further fundamental change.

Reclaiming Latin America

Reclaiming Latin America PDF Author: Doctor Steve Ludlam
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848137648
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reclaiming Latin America is a one-stop guide to the revival of social democratic and socialist politics across the region. At the end of the Cold War, and through decades of neoliberal domination and the 'Washington Consensus' it seemed that the left could do nothing but beat a ragged retreat in Latin America. Yet this book looks at the new opportunities that sprang up through electoral politics and mass action during that period. The chapters here warn against over-simplification of the so-called 'pink wave'. Instead, through detailed historical analysis of Latin America as a whole and country-specific case studies, the book demonstrates the variety of approaches to establishing a lasting social justice. From the anti-imperialism of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas in Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba, to the more gradualist routes being taken in Chile, Argentina and Brazil, Reclaiming Latin America gives a real sense of the plurality of political responses to popular discontent.