Ten years ago, Rebecca Abers published the first scholarly book in English on participatory budgeting in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre: Reinventing Local Democracy (2000). Since then, a score of books have come out on the subject, including one by this author, as well as numerous scholarly articles and doctoral dissertations. Empirical trends have been no less striking: “cases of participatory innovation … are surprisingly common and appear to represent a growing trend toward experimentation with participatory forms of democracy in local governments throughout Latin America” [Selee and Peruzzotti, ix].
All this attention reflects widespread concern with multiple ‘quality deficits’ among contemporary Latin American democracies [Diamond, Plattner, and Brun (2008); Diamond and Morlino (2005); O’Donnell, Cullell, and Iazzetta (2004)]. The ‘Participatory Promise,’ celebrated in many of the first generation of studies of participatory budgeting in Brazil (i.e. 1990s to early 2000s), resurrects the hope that human agency — democratic human agency — can and does matter even in the face of Latin America’s longstanding social inequalities, democratically debilitating corruption, and political clientelism [In addition to Abers (2000), a list of such ‘first generation’ book-length studies would include Avritzer (2002); Avritzer and Navarro (2003); Baiocchi (2003); Chavez and Goldfrank (2004); Fedozzi (2000); Nylen (2003); and Vilas Boas (1994)]. By and large, the first generation studied successful cases of PB, mostly in Brazil and many focusing on Porto Alegre. Findings indicated that PB tends to uphold the Participatory Promise that participatory reforms can be efficacious in ‘democratizing democracy.’
Ten years and many more empirical cases later, some of us are not so sure. A second generation of studies of PB and other mechanisms of participatory innovation (PI) — some of which are listed below — has since brought to bear a range of sophisticated and varied methodologies and applied them to cases of both success and failure, and of various ‘in-between’ outcomes. And while many analysts continue to study experiences of local-level PIs in Brazil, Porto Alegre’s PB is no longer presented as the norm; on the contrary, it is widely recognized as something of an anomaly. (Read More. . .)
church, employer, party, government, etc. to a sense of individual choice (Bellah et al 1985, Yankelovich 1982, 1998, Wolfe 2001). Contemporary Americans are in some sense freer than they have ever been in the history of the United States, if not the world. Sociologist Alan Wolfe explains (2001: 199-200):
participants who were seated in 8 groups, each facilitated by a moderator. The participants looked at four distinctly different but commonly held approaches to defining the public’s role before developing responses of their own.
The conversational perspective naturally generates the image of the town square or general store cracker barrel with everyone having a say in a rational dialogue. While a comforting image supporting the ideals of direct democracy, it would be naive to see the contemporary political conversation in such terms. Not all conversations involve equal partners nor are based on logical deliberation. Some conversations are virtually dictated from the top. Emotion and illogical content often carry the day. Just because conversations fail our standards for the logical application of facts to a well-defined problem resulting in a reasonable set of actions, does not undermine their basic characteristics as conversations.
engagement – came up as an example of an organization whose approach to engaging citizens she approved of (italics below are mine):
But does this “leader training ground” approach to education advance the public good? Surely it does if students are selected from far and wide according to their academic merit rather than their social status, right?
Historically, if it can be said that there has been a broad trend in the United States toward the rejection of politics since the late nineteenth century, that rejection has taken two forms. First, in certain ways there has been a shift from collective to individual political engagement, e.g., from public to private voting, from grassroots political parties to professional, money and media-driven parties, plus a steady decline in labor union membership. Second, there has been a more recent shift, dating roughly from the 1970s onward, from political to civic action, as politics becomes a dirtier word due in part to the watershed that was Watergate, and as more and younger Americans opt for civic ways to help others or “give back.” This rejection of politics springs in part from certain forms of individualism some if not many Americans share.
Alexis de Tocqueville is widely considered to be the founding father of studies in community-based empowerment and participatory democracy. Researching and writing his famous Democracy in America back in the early 1800s, he was the first to argue the relationship between, in the first instance, a particular democratic institutional design (“administrative decentralization,” and vibrant local-level “secondary institutions” and “voluntary associations”) and, subsequently, a cooperative democratic political culture (“self interest properly understood”).