Developing Political Strategies across a New Democratic and State Architecture

Brian Wampler

doi:10.25222/larr.356

Abstract

Under new democratic regimes, civil society organizations (CSOs) alter their political strategies to better engage public officials and citizens as well as to influence broader political debates. In Brazil, between 1990 and 2010, CSOs gained access to a broad participatory architecture as well as a reconfigured state, inducing CSOs to employ a wider range of strategies. This article uses a political network approach to illuminate variation in CSOs’ political strategies across four policy arenas and show how the role of the state, the broader configuration of civil society, the interests of elected officials, and the rules of participatory institutions interact to produce this variation. Data for this article’s analysis come from a survey of three hundred CSO leaders in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte. The survey identified the strategies they employed to promote policy change and direct resource allocation in the arenas of participatory budgeting, health care, social services, and housing. Sociographs generated from survey results reveal a distinct clustering within each policy arena of the strategies employed by CSOs, providing further support to the usefulness of the analytical framework.

Highlights

Civil society activists, across Latin America, engage in demonstrations, incremental participatory venues, campaigns and elections, and oversight programs; they move inside and outside state and democratic institutions in the hopes of securing scarce public resources for their communities.1 These activists develop political, personal, and policy networks to forge better connections to civil servants and public officials responsible for policy selection as well as service delivery
To assess the differences across the four public policy arenas, we begin with degree centrality, which measures the importance of the different political activities utilized by civil society organizations (CSOs) leaders in each policy arena
The political network approach utilized in this article helps to illuminate the clustering of political activities by CSOs within specific policy arenas as well as the differences across policy arenas

Summary

Introduction

Across Latin America, engage in demonstrations, incremental participatory venues, campaigns and elections, and oversight programs; they move inside and outside state and democratic institutions in the hopes of securing scarce public resources for their communities. These activists develop political, personal, and policy networks to forge better connections to civil servants and public officials responsible for policy selection as well as service delivery. Across Latin America, engage in demonstrations, incremental participatory venues, campaigns and elections, and oversight programs; they move inside and outside state and democratic institutions in the hopes of securing scarce public resources for their communities.. Across Latin America, engage in demonstrations, incremental participatory venues, campaigns and elections, and oversight programs; they move inside and outside state and democratic institutions in the hopes of securing scarce public resources for their communities.1 These activists develop political, personal, and policy networks to forge better connections to civil servants and public officials responsible for policy selection as well as service delivery. Four factors most significantly affect the strategies employed by civil society leaders: state formation, the historical development of civil society, party politics, and specific rules that determine who can participate in participatory venues. If the state is weakly established and without resources, activists must

Methods

Results

Conclusion