When Does Participatory Democracy Deepen the Quality of Democracy? Lessons from Brazil

Abstract

Over the past two decades participatory institutions have been initiated throughout the developing world in order to deepen the quality of democracy. Local governments in countries as diverse as Brazil, India, Venezuela, South Africa, and Indonesia have experimented with participatory institutions to promote accountability, create active and knowledgeable citizens, and establish the conditions for achieving social justice.) The initial body of research on participatory democracy programs has largely extolled the positive benefits of these institutions, highlighting how participatory institutions have been able to produce specific social and political advances that deepen the quality of democracy.2 According to this research, social capital is being generated, citizens are being empowered, and governments are becoming more transparent.3 Despite a rich literature on participatory institutions in democratizing countries, a coherent theoretical explanation to account for where and when these participatory experiences are likely to be successful is still lacking. Institutions as diverse as the World Bank, the United Nations, Brazil's leftist Workers' Party, and India's Communist Party currently promote the adoption of participatory institutions, which means that it is crucial to develop a generalizable theoretical framework that will better explain a wide range of outcomes. The absence of a generalizable theoretical framework to explain the divergent outcomes produced by participatory institutions has methodological and conceptual roots. Methodologically, most studies on participatory institutions are single case studies and have focused on the most successful cases.4 Although these studies have greatly advanced an understanding of how participatory institutions can deepen democracy, their theoretical findings are not generalizable because they select on the dependent variable.5 A significant conceptual problem is that civil society has received the lion's share of scholars' attention while the actions of state officials have been downplayed despite the integral role they play in these participatory processes. 61