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7 The Left and Participatory Democracy: Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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c h a p t e r s e v e n The Left and Participatory Democracy Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela b e n j a m i n g o l d f r a n k In the 1980s and early 1990s, when centrist, populist, or right-wing parties dominated Latin America’s new (and old) democracies, many of the region’s left parties underwent a political transformation. Rather than dismissing or downplaying the importance of democratic institutions, as they often had before, parts of the Left came to view “deepening” democracy as the primary goal (Roberts 1998). Direct citizen participation in government decision making was the key mechanism proposed to achieve democratic deepening by parties such as the Workers’ Party (PT) in Brazil, the United Left (IU) in Peru, the Broad Front (FA) in Uruguay, and the Radical Cause (LCR) in Venezuela. At the local level, where the “left turn” arguably began, these parties began implementing participatory institutions that attempted not only to deepen or radicalize democracy but also to solidify alliances with social movements and reach new constituencies. In some cases, like the PT’s innovative budget process in Porto Alegre, these participatory institutions gained national and even international fame as exemplars of deepening democracy at a time when observers were otherwise pessimistic about the quality of democracy in Latin America.¹ At the turn of the century, as left parties began winning national elections, expectations that the Left would adapt its local attempts at participatory democracy to the national level were widespread, encouraged by the election campaigns of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Hugo Chávez, and Tabaré Vázquez. This chapter attempts to identify and explain the national patterns of participatory politics emerging in Latin America. The first section outlines the debates within and outside the Left regarding citizen participation in local government up until the late 1990s, before several left-leaning presidents came into office. Sections two and three focus on Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela. They examine why the administrations of Chávez, Lula, and Vázquez pursued different participation policies, describe these policies, and briefly evaluate them. Overall, the radical democratic principles that inspired the Left at the local level have mostly faded. In Brazil and Uruguay, the The Left and Participatory Democracy 163 radical democratic approach has been replaced by revamped versions of societal corporatism , with a new NGO orientation in Brazil and an added rural component in Uruguay. In Venezuela’s vast number of participation policies, radical democrats have been competing mostly unsuccessfully with more traditional clientelist and Leninist visions of politics. Largely mirroring the arguments made by Levitsky and Roberts, in the introduction to this volume, about the variety across cases of left government , this chapter explains the distinct types of participation policies implemented by pointing to differences in the incumbent coalitions’ social bases, internal organizations , histories with participation, and strength vis-à-vis opposition parties. In addition, it suggests that examining an old and never resolved debate within the Left about the relationship between participatory and representative democracy helps our understanding of the new patterns in the region. Local-Level Participatory Democracy and the Left (and Its Critics) Until relatively recently, debates within the Latin American Left focused on nationallevel politics and the interrelated tensions that mark reform versus revolution, parties versus guerrilla movements, parliamentary versus activist politics, and social democracy versus socialism. As part of the Left’s new appreciation for democracy during the era of widespread military rule, citizen or “popular” participation gradually was given new emphasis in political discourse and policy proposals. As democratization proceeded , this emphasis allowed left parties to distinguish themselves from rivals further to the right and also, in many cases, from their own pasts. Participatory democracy offered an alternative both to liberalism and to violent revolution. Given election outcomes, this participatory discourse focused mostly on local-level politics. Unable to win national executive office throughout the region in the 1980s and early 1990s, left parties performed increasingly well in municipal elections, particularly in large cities such as national capitals (Chávez and Goldfrank 2004). As is true of many of the later national left victories, the local Left’s electoral success was partly a result of its representation of the “losers” from the region’s neoliberal turn, the urban middle class and the organized working class (Goldfrank and Schrank 2009). The Left’s rise to local power² progressed unevenly across countries and included many reversals. It...