Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre (review)

Say "Porto Alegre" and many people think of a democratic utopia, a city where ordinary citizens, many of whom are poor and illiterate, make the decisions that affect their lives in a kind of never-ending deliberative workshop. Yet the romance surrounding Brazil's Porto Alegre and its participatory management has discouraged scholars from explaining why and when the process actually works. In Militants and Citizens, University of Massachusetts sociologist Gianpaolo Baoicchi sets himself that task. His conclusions are surprising, and have broader implications for our understanding of the bases of civic engagement.

To social theorists who locate the wellsprings of democratic innovation only in the union halls, churches, literary circles and other "free spaces" of civil society, Baoicchi shows that municipal governments can implement genuine mechanisms for citizen input. In the budgeting forums that Baoicchi observed, residents made decisions that mattered. They debated, negotiated and sometimes revised their original preferences, exhibiting a firm commitment to the public good. This was not always the case. Truly deliberative forums depended on the existence of activists and activist networks. This was true in two senses. It was activists who, in the late 1980s, pushed the governing party to expand participatory mechanisms in a way that made them effective. More importantly, and with implications that extend well beyond Porto Alegre, activists played a critical role in facilitating constructive political dialogue within the forums after they were established. Long experienced in negotiating among diverse interests and possessing strong oppositional credentials with residents, activists kept discussion focused and temperate while often pushing past the bounds of the immediate to promote political learning. They recruited participants, negotiated among parties before, after and during meetings, and secured information that residents needed to deliberate effectively.

There are two important implications for democratic theorists. One is that democratic deliberation depends on what happens before, after and in the margins of meetings as much as during the formal period. The other is that activism is not the enemy of deliberation. As many democratic theorists have seen it, deliberation is civil, reasoned and oriented to the common good. Activism, by contrast, is palpably uncivil, impassioned and single-minded. Baoicchi rejects that view by drawing on an ingenious comparison of three municipal districts with very different civic configurations, that is, different relationships among neighborhood activists and officials. The district with longstanding activist networks and a popular council that functioned independently of the government-sponsored forum produced high levels of citizen participation and trust and few occasions in which the deliberative process broke down. By comparison, forums in a district lacking opportunities for civic interaction outside the forum were popular, but tended to become platforms for participants to attack and defend each other's personal reputations. This is not to say that activists and officials always worked together harmoniously. In a third district, activists were cohesive and mobilized but they consistently opposed the administration and sought to derail the budgeting forums. The result was that residents distrusted both the budgeting process and even their own delegates, and breakdowns in deliberation were frequent. The punch line is that government-sponsored participatory democracy depends on the existence of civil society associations, but ones that are unafraid to work within the system as well as outside it.

Baoicchi draws on a variety of methods to reach that conclusion, including ethnographic observation of citizen forums and activist meetings, interviews with officials and activists, and surveys of residents. His comparative strategy not only illuminates the structural conditions for effective citizen engagement, but offers a new way to think about the composition of civil society, long an ill-defined term. By combining survey data on residents' levels of trust in their institutions with ethnographic observation of public encounters, Baoicchi gets at the processes by which trust is established or undermined. In short, Militants and Citizens should have a wide audience among democratic theorists, political sociologists, scholars of civil society and sociologists of culture.

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