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1. See, especially, the special issue on local government in NACLA (1995) and the series by Harnecker (1995a, 1995b, 1995c). 2 A Tale of Three Cities Why did Porto Alegre’s participation program succeed most compared to similar programs tried in Caracas and Montevideo? As the second part of this chapter illustrates, many of the keys to success and the stumbling blocks preventing it described by scholars seem unpersuasive answers. The three cities were fundamentally similar with regard to most of the elements emphasized in the literature: type of incumbent party and civil society organizations, city size and level of development, and the quality of municipal bureaucracies. Initially, even the participation programs themselves were remarkably alike. Yet two crucial differences changed the trajectory of the participation programs in the three cities, as the third part of this chapter shows. One was the greater degree of national decentralization in Brazil and Uruguay than in Venezuela. The other was the existence of strongly institutionalized opposition parties in Montevideo and Caracas compared to the weakly institutionalized opposition in Porto Alegre. These two factors best explain the differences in the eventual design of the participation programs and, in turn, Porto Alegre’s greater success in deepening democracy. The tale of these three cities, however, cannot be told without first explaining why I chose them and what I did to learn the tale. That is, a few words on case selection and data collection are in order. My initial reason for selecting the participation programs in Caracas, Montevideo, and Porto Alegre as cases for comparison was that, of the many cities in which such programs were attempted in the 1980s and 1990s, the programs in these cities stood out in existing studies as the most comprehensive, city-wide initiatives.1 For the most part, major participation programs in other cities A TALE Of ThREE CITIES 35 2. Indeed, although a few national party leaders had met at meetings of the São Paulo Forum, they did not learn of their similar municipal government programs until Marta Harnecker began conducting interviews with party leaders in each of the cities in the early 1990s. According to Maria Cristina Iglesias, the former substitute mayor of Caracas and one of LCR’s leaders, even then the exchange of ideas between the parties was minimal (inteview, 2/9/99). Only in the mid1990s , after the programs had been in place for several years in Porto Alegre and Montevideo, did communication between the PT and FA municipal administrations become more regular, beginning with the convocation of a seminar in Montevideo in which several Latin American and Spanish municipal officials described their local experiences with participation and decentralization (see IMM, AECI, and CAM 1994). This seminar did not include members of LCR’s administration in Caracas. It does seem that, in the late 1990s at least, the FA administration may have borrowed from the Porto Alegre PT to some degree. Montevideo city officials began to call part of their decentralized participation program “participatory budgeting,” adopting the name used in Porto Alegre, though not much more than the name. For a methodological discussion of independence of cases and historical learning (or “Galton’s problem”), see Lijphart (1975, 171). during this time period were either concentrated and compartmentalized in certain sectors, such as health care and housing in São Paulo, and milk distribution in Lima, or were in cities with much smaller populations, like Ciudad Guayana or Cuenca. The parties in charge of implementing these programs—PT in Porto Alegre, FA in Montevideo, and LCR in Caracas—were also prominent advocates of increasing citizen participation in local government . Porto Alegre, Montevideo, and Caracas thus represented the most appropriate sites for testing whether the benefits of participatory democracy claimed by its promoters were actually produced. At the same time, choosing cases in several countries allowed me to assess the independent impact of different national settings, particularly in terms of the prevailing types of political parties and the degree of national decentralization. Venezuela and Uruguay represent countries with histories of strongly institutionalized political parties, while Brazil’s parties are notoriously weak. On measures of decentralization, Brazil usually scores very high (along with Argentina and Colombia), while Venezuela and Uruguay rank as moderate decentralizers compared to other countries in Latin America. Most importantly, though, Venezuela’s municipalities have historically provided fewer services, had less political autonomy, and spent a smaller share of government revenues than their counterparts in either Brazil or Uruguay. The three cases also...

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