Deepening Local Democracy in Latin America: Participation, Decentralization, and the Left

Tables

Tables 2.1 Vote share for the PT in Porto Alegre 39 2.2 Municipal and metropolitan population size in 1990 47 2.3 Municipal land area 48 2.4 Basic service provision 53 2.5 Socioeconomic indicators (circa 1990) 54 2.6 Number of registered neighborhood associations 56 2.7 Size of municipal bureaucracy 63 4.1 Poverty, vote share, and spending 161 4.2 Poverty, spending, and participation 162 4.3 Age and education distributions 164 5.1 Opinion of participatory budgeting 198 5.2 Need, spending, population size, and participation (district-years) 216 5.3 Distributional formula 217 6.1 Summary 221 6.2 Favorable ratings of city services (in percentages) 229 6.3 Increased street paving 233 6.4 Municipal government housing construction from 1950 to 2000 233 6.5 Participation in civic organizations 240 6.6 Quality of local democracy 246 Acknowledgments Over the course of several years of researching and writing this book in several different locations, I have accumulated far too many debts to acknowledge them all individually here. What follows is my best attempt to recognize all those who have helped me in some way or another to make the book possible. Most of all, I want to thank the dozens of people who allowed me into their homes and offices for often lengthy and always interesting interviews in Caracas, Montevideo, and Porto Alegre. Many of them are named in the course of the book; I have changed the names of those who were not public officials to protect their identities (and of one city employee who preferred anonymity). While all translations of interviews (and of passages from written work) are my own, I owe thanks to Ivette Goldfrank and Nicole Caso for their help translating some particularly tricky dichos. In each of the three research sites, some individuals went beyond what I expected to provide me with extra help, facilitating access to libraries and data and assisting me in arranging important interviews, and to them I am particularly grateful: Rosangel Alvarez, Carlos Contreras, Ana Maria Sanjuán, and Edgardo Lander in Caracas; Rita Grisolia, Alicia Veneziano, Javier Vidal, Maria Elena Laurnaga, Luis Eduardo González, and María José Doyenart in Montevideo; and, in Porto Alegre, Marcello Baquero and Manuel Passos at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Regina Pozzobon and Sérgio Baierle at CIDADE, and Luciano Brunet, Marlene Steffen, and Assis Brasil at City Hall. I also benefited from frequent conversations and pooled resources with fellow researchers to whom I remain grateful: Gianpaolo Baiocchi in Porto Alegre and Daniel Chavez in Montevideo. In Berkeley, my two chief advisors, Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, encouraged me to pursue the study of what had originally been a littleknown subject—participatory budgeting—and then consistently pushed me to clarify my concepts and arguments in countless conversations and email exchanges over a number of years. Chris Ansell and Peter Evans likewise provided excellent advice at crucial periods of the research and writing, particularly for the Montevideo case. Michael Watts offered sage advice in the early stages of designing the research project. I also owe thanks to several X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS fellow students at Berkeley for their comments on different aspects of the project: Aaron Schneider, Laura Henry, Loren Landau, Zach Elkins, and Ken Foster. I am also grateful for the generous financial support for the fieldwork and writeup that I received from a number of sources, including the US Fulbright Commission and several institutions at UC Berkeley: the Department of Political Science, the Institute for International Studies, the Graduate Division, and the Center for Latin American Studies. In Albuquerque, I am grateful to Kenneth Roberts and Andrew Schrank, who provided encouragement and advice, and to Mark Peceny, who read an early draft of the manuscript and offered excellent suggestions. I am also thankful for the Eugene Gallegos Lectureship from the University of New Mexico. In South Orange, I would like to thank Martin Edwards for his advice and support. Several colleagues also provided valuable feedback at conferences where parts of this book were presented, including Brian Wampler, Stephanie McNulty, Yanina Welp, Egon Montecinos, Carlos Mascareño, Alberto Ford, Eliza Willis, and Alfred Montero. In various places, friends and family both old and new gave me immeasurable apoyo moral. In Caracas, the Flores Lugos brought me into their home and made me part of the family. In wintry Montevideo, Magdalena...