Participatory Democracy in Practice—Brazil’s Workers’ Party and the Participatory Budget

Abstract

On November 15, 1988, former City Council member, Luiza Erundina, of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores—PT) was elected mayor of Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo. Erundina’s election was truly a historical event in Brazil’s political history. Much of the São Paulo PT leadership and active militancy were the same leaders and activists of the metalworkers strikes ten years earlier that had brazenly and successfully challenged both the government and the powerful oligopoly of foreign-owned automobile companies for the first time since the military took power in 1964. Then there was Erundina herself: a middle-aged unmarried woman, an immigrant from the Northeast of Brazil (generally considered the country’s economic and cultural backwater by São Paulo natives), and an activist in one of the more radical wings of the openly Socialist PT. Finally, the contrast with Erundina’s predecessor could not have been more pronounced: the quixotic octogenarian, Jânio Quadros—a former president (until resigning suddenly in 1961 in his first year of office), and a master at Brazil’s traditional intra-elite game of stitching together electoral and governing coalitions by trading public funds and privileged access to public services and jobs in return for political and financial support among boss-style city council members and powerful economic elites.