Participatory Institutions in Democratic Brazil (review)

In the last two decades, Brazil has become a laboratory for innovation in city government. Elected officials and representatives of grass-roots social movements have joined forces in Brazilian cities to create new institutions with distinctive designs, including the bottom-up model of participatory budgeting, power-sharing arrangements in health councils, and ratification mechanisms in city master plans. Participatory Institutions in Democratic Brazil compares the creation and implementation of these institutions in four different Brazilian state capitals – Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul), Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais), São Paulo (São Paulo) and Salvador (Bahia), and offers a rich array of theoretical insights, empirical evidence, and practical conclusions that will be of interest to scholars and political activists alike.

Avritzer asks three questions at the beginning of the book. "Is the Brazilian experience a model for increasing participation elsewhere? Can the successful experience in Brazilian cities be reproduced in places where the conditions may be very different? And under what conditions can participatory institutions succeed?" (1). His answer to the first question is yes, with the caveat that the context of city politics, and especially the strength of civil society and the degree of consensus about participation in political society, is crucial in determining the success of the new institutions. In response to the second question, his answer is "yes, but.…" Avritzer argues that while bottom-up participatory designs are the most democratic and consequential, in terms of the redistribution of public goods, they are also the most difficult to implement, especially where civil society is weak and/or political society divided (166). This leads to his answer to the third question, which is that in cities where civil society is strong and political society is divided, power-sharing designs are likely to lead to more effective participatory institutions than bottom-up designs (168), and where civil society is weak, ratification designs can be most effective (172).

The four case studies provide plenty of variation in outcomes. Scholars of Brazil will not be surprised by Avritzer's finding that participatory institutions of all three types worked best in Porto Alegre and very well in Belo Horizonte, due to the relative strength of civil society organizations, and the consensus in favour of participation in political society, in those two cities. (The 16-year hegemony of the Workers' Party, or Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT – in Porto Alegre from 1989 to 2005 being an additional factor in the outcome there.) São Paulo is a mixed case. Although it has a relatively strong civil society, especially in the eastern part of the city, its political society was divided in response to demands for more participation. Even the PT, which pioneered participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, was ambivalent about participation in São Paulo, and downplayed it under the administration of Mayor Marta Suplicy (2001–2004). According to Avritzer, participatory budgeting was unsuccessful in São Paulo (or "almost unsuccessful"; p. 115) because the range of policy areas in which participants had a say was much narrower than it was in Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte, and this generated alienation on the part of participants. On the other hand, the power-sharing arrangements in the health councils allowed São Paulo's civil society to advocate for reforms despite the hostility of parts of political society, and was somewhat successful, with results (as measured by access to health services on the part of the poorest) comparable to those in Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte. Finally, Avritzer argues that the public ratification required in the city master planning process worked well in São Paulo, overcoming the polarization in political society and "establishing a long-term consensus around a new way of regulating public policy" (159).

Salvador is the outlier among the case studies, which fits with other studies of the city, which for so long was the bastion of "Carlismo," the clientelistic and patronage-based machine politics of the legendary Antonio Carlos Magalhães, or ACM (1927...