Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gianpaolo Baiocchi is Associate Professor of Sociology at Brown University. He is the author of Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre (Stanford University Press, 2005) and Radicals in Power: The Workers' Party and Experiments in Urban Democracy in Brazil(2003).
Patrick Heller is Associate Professor of Sociology at Brown University. He is the coauthor of Social Democracy in the Global Periphery: Origins and Prospects (2007) and author of The Labor Development: Workers and the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India (1999).
Marcelo Kunrath Silva is Associate Professor of Sociology and Rural Sociology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

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Bootstrapping Democracy

Stanford University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations..................................................................ixPreface................................................................................xiAcronyms and Terms.....................................................................xvIntroduction Evaluating Participatory Democracy.......................................11 Civil Society and the Local State: Toward a Relational Framework.....................182 The Emergence of Local Democracy in Brazil...........................................393 Assessing the Impact of Participatory Budgeting......................................594 Representation by Design.............................................................805 Making Space for Civil Society.......................................................107Conclusion Bootstrapping Participatory Democracy......................................142Appendix...............................................................................167Notes..................................................................................173Bibliography...........................................................................181Index..................................................................................197

Chapter One

Although the concept of civil society has a long and complicated history in political theory, it is only in recent decades that it has become an object of sustained empirical interest. After a first revival in the late 1980s driven by the waves of democratization in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Kaldor 2004), and subsequent world events like the World Social Forum, the idea of civil society has continued to animate a variety of scholarship on the potentials and pitfalls of associational life. Civil society has been referred to as a "millennial idea" (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001), and its rediscovery marks a turning point in political sociology. Somers has argued that for much of the twentieth century, political sociology worked with the assumption that there were "only two essential towering protagonists of social organization that forged the modern world: the modern administrative state and the market economy" (1995, 230). It has now become commonplace to theorize civil society as a necessary third leg of modernity providing a necessary complement to the market and the state. As Somers argues, "It has been called a 'third' space of popular social movements and collective mobilization, of informal networks and associations, and of community solidarities that sustain a participatory public life symbolized not by the sovereign individualism of the market or by the state" (1995, 230).

Certain scholarly works, such as the 1989 English translation of Habermas's The Public Sphere and the publication of Putnam, Leonardi, and Nanetti's Making Democracy Work, have been particularly influential in shaping the debate and most notably in reconceptualizing democracy from the vantage point of civil society. Our toolkit for understanding democratization has been expanded to include concepts such as the "public sphere" and "citizenship," concepts that have been specifically developed to highlight how political practices are culturally specific to peoples, places, and issues (Dagnino 1998; Mahajan 1999).

We find the problematic that has emerged around civil society to be as exciting as it is confusing, however. The civil society literature has made a strong case that different patterns of association can substantively improve the quality of democracy, but any such general claim is subject to five important qualifications. First, as many critics have noted, the normative ideal of civil society—rights-bearing citizens who achieve a degree of democratic governance through deliberation—is often substituted for the actual practices in civil society. In this celebratory view of civil society, the democratizing effects of civil society are taken for granted rather than demonstrated. Second, while the literature has had much to say about the mobilizational capacity of civil society, it has had little to say about how civil society can effectively engage the state and influence public policy. While civil society actors may be good at problematizing new issues, mobilizing previously marginalized populations, and in some cases even transforming societal norms, we know little about when and how such efforts are effectively scaled-up into institutional practices that can sustain a new political equilibrium. Third, most of the literature has focused on national civil societies or transnational networks, and far too little research has focused on local civil societies. Fourth, even though it is widely recognized that there is enormous variation in the configuration of actual civil societies, efforts to develop useful typologies have barely gotten beyond highly descriptive terms such as "vibrant," "thick," and "effervescent." Fifth, many recent treatments of civil society have tempered the celebratory view by emphasizing the extent to which many aspects of associational life are artifactual, that is, based on the institutional context in which they are embedded. We find this criticism to be basically sound (indeed, it is confirmed by the findings in this book), but we caution that the emphasis in this artifactual literature (for example, Armony 2004) has often swung to the other extreme of the celebratory literature in its emphasis on how civil society is constrained or hemmed in by social and state power. Between these two extremes, there have been few attempts to examine how institutional designs and reforms might actually encourage and strengthen citizen participation, that is, how civil society itself might become more or less democratic as a result of its interaction with institutions of the state.

TOWARD A RELATIONAL ACCOUNT OF CIVIL SOCIETY

"Follow the actors!"—Bruno Latour

Following the call of scholars like Mamdani (1996) who urge us to look at "actually existing civil societies," in this book we offer what we have come to think of as a "middle-way," or a sociologically realistic account of civil society. Drawing on the relational tradition in sociology, we propose to move beyond what we call the "institutional-associational divide," the divide between those who emphasize formal institutions and those who emphasize society-side factors, or roughly speaking, the divide between political science and sociology. The relational tools we deploy here both illuminate spaces in the interstices of society and state and expose the centrality of relationships across those divides in shaping practices on both sides. But our account is also a "middle-way" account in the sense that it relies on and dialogues with normative political theory while it is also informed by sociologically realistic accounts of inequality and power. We thus develop a deontologized account of civil society, one that rejects the confusion of the empirical with the romantic, but nonetheless holds it up to the critical gaze of normative theory. Concretely situated in the sociological literature, this means drawing on authors who are attentive to power dynamics within civil society and relatively cynical of its potential (Bourdieu) as well as authors who are attentive to the emancipatory possibilities of association and communication (Habermas).

The democratic possibilities of civil society have received extensive theoretical attention from scholars in recent years, most influentially in the work of Jürgen Habermas (1984, 1989, 1996), Jeffrey Alexander (2006), Margaret Somers (1993, 1994), and Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato (1992). This view of civil society rests on two critical claims. First, under certain historical and sociopolitical conditions, civil society can emerge as a relatively independent sphere governed by associational and communicative practices that are differentiated from the market, state, and traditional affiliations. Second, in such a sphere, citizens engaged in a plurality of forms of deliberation—from microinstitutions to the national media—effectively supplement interest-group bargaining and simple aggregation (elections) as authoritative sources of decision-making. The primary mechanisms through which deliberation produces effects are through the transformation of preferences when the force of the better argument wins out and the resulting elaboration of new norms. Since the underlying rationale of deliberation is predicated on reason-giving rather than money, power, or status, deliberative processes are in principle inclusionary, that is, the only precondition to participation is membership in the political community. This, then, is the sense in which civil society scholars have emphasized the liberatory potential of associational life. As elaborated by Habermas (1989) and more recently by Alexander, the concept of the "public sphere" attempts to salvage the role of democratic deliberation as a potentially emancipatory activity from the theoretical pessimism of the Marxist tradition in which power trumps voice, and the reductivism of aggregative theories of democracy (the liberal tradition and most notably Schumpeter) that limit democracy to its delegative function. It is in the public sphere that citizens debate common problems in a publicly minded way. In a similar way, for Alexander it is in the civil sphere, a "society of individuals before the state" that solidarity emerges and communicative judgments are pronounced: "Standing firmly inside the civil rather than the state sphere, communicative institutions become free to broadcast interpretations that are not only independent of the state, but can challenge its commands" (2006, 108).

But a relational treatment of the public sphere demands that we carefully contextualize it, and in particular that we recognize the ways in which it is constituted and constantly constrained by power relations. No sociologist has given the question of power more systematic attention than Bourdieu. If civil society theorists have focused on the emancipatory potential of the public sphere, Bourdieu emphasizes the workings of power within those voluntary spheres. All spheres of action—"fields" in Bourdieu's terminology—are constituted by power. Fields such as art, education, academia, and politics are the balance sheet at any given time of past struggles, representing and reproducing an equation of power. The ability to compete effectively in any field is a function of the forms and combinations of capital—cultural, social, and economic—that are valorized in that field. Because of lifelong processes of socialization—the habitus—different actors embody specific dispositions and bring different bundles of capital to any given field, more or less predetermining their trajectory within that field. If Bourdieu's sociology is one of reproduction—that is, a theory of how patterns of inequality are actively reproduced—it differs from other theories of reproduction by its emphasis on the cultural and in particular on the centrality of symbolic domination in the reproduction of modern, institutionally differentiated societies. For Bourdieu, symbolic power, the power to define what is given as natural, and specifically "every power which manages to impose meaning and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force" (1977, 4) is the key structuring element of modern societies, especially societies that model themselves on the liberal ideals of reason and merit. Dominant groups, enjoying a surplus of cultural and educational capital, have the power to define the various classification systems through which competencies are distributed and groups hierarchically defined.

The dominated, having internalized, through the habitus—"the internalized form of the class condition of the conditionings it entails" (1984, 101)—the cognitive structures through which their practical knowledge of the social world is gained, learn to "refuse what they are refused" (1984, 471). In this respect, Bourdieu's work stands as a powerful critique of modern civil societies. For Bourdieu, deliberation and participatory democracy reproduce hierarchies. On the one hand, it reproduces class hierarchies, since the outcome of the political struggle, predetermined by the existing distributions of power, is only further misrecognized when represented as freed from power. On the other hand, it reproduces hierarchies of political competence of "experts" against non-experts within the field of politics (a hierarchy that is likely to align along, roughly, class lines, but need not be coterminous with it). Bourdieu denounces fictions of "linguistic communism"—that the ability to speak is equally distributed to all, asserting that "not all linguistic utterances are equally acceptable and not all locutors equal." As Bourdieu writes, "The authorized speech of status-generated competence, a powerful speech which helps to create what it says, is answered by the silence of an equally status-linked incompetence, which is experienced as technical incapacity and leaves no choice but delegation—a misrecognized dispossession of the less competent by the more competent, of women by men, of the less educated by the more educated, of those who 'do not know to speak' to those who 'speak well'" (1984, 413–14).

Instead of opting to emphasize power and inequality or association and dialogue, our account is attentive to both possibilities. Actually existing civil societies are ones in which association and dialogue exist, but that are also shaped by power and inequalities. In our view the existence of inequalities does not nullify the emancipatory possibilities of association, just as association does not need perfect equality as a precondition. Following Burawoy's (2008) critique of Bourdieu, we locate the limits and constraints to association and liberated speech not in the habitus—the deeply internalized dispositions and practices that makes agents complicit in their own subordination—but rather in the institutions and social arrangements that unevenly distribute associational capabilities and deliberative competencies. Pragmatically, this means coming to terms with the simple observation that organizations operating in the space of civil society are as likely to be schools of democracy as they are to be vehicles of clientelistic control and hierarchy. Or to put it another way, working with Gramsci's original formulation of civil society as a terrain of both contestation and legitimation, we recognize that civil society is the terrain where new claims emerge but also where consent to the dominant order is organized. Examining civil society without romanticism, Laclau (2006) urges us to decompose it into component parts and to problematize its democracy-enhancing effects. As Alexander puts it, "Real civil societies are created by social actors at a particular time and in a particular place" (2006, 6). In what follows, we develop the tools to carry out the task of understanding these "real civil societies."

BEYOND THE INSTITUTIONAL-ASSOCIATIONAL DIVIDE

The literature on democracy has become split between an institutionalist view and a societal one. In the institutionalist view, democracy is defined in formal, procedural terms. A consolidated democracy is one in which certain basic institutions—the electoral system and the constitution that guarantees rights of association—function properly. Less-than-democratic is simply defined in terms of underdeveloped or poorly functioning democratic institutions. With their formalist view of democracy, institutionalists are generally more pre occupied with the official venues and events of democracy, and less with the actors and practices of a democratic society. To the extent that they acknowledge the significance of civil society, they do so largely by defining it in terms of the liberal tradition of legally guaranteed individual rights of association and property. The sociological critique of this literature is that it confuses democratic rights with democratic practices (Somers 1993). The problem is that even if the institutions did, in fact, conform perfectly with the principles of democratic practice, they are routinely and readily subverted by nondemocratic norms and extrademocratic powers. Moreover, the institutions themselves have a perverse logic. In the absence of countervailing powers, they are subject to being instrumentalized, that is, transformed into instruments of power (as in Michel's Iron Law of Oligarchy) that have distinctly illiberal effects. Thus if we are concerned with how democracies actually work, we need to look beyond institutions to discover civil society.

In response both to the formalism of the institutionalist view and its lack of concern with the normative dimension of democracy—that is, the degree to which democratic practices approximate democratic norms—the recent civil society literature has directed the spotlight to the democracy-enhancing role of civil society. Often drawing inspiration from Rousseauian conceptions of democracy that emphasize the deliberations of citizens as the heart of democratic practice, this literature argues that the real measure of a democracy lies in the actual practices and norms of civil society. The civil society view argues that politics are not confined to formal arenas and takes the institutionalists to task for failing in particular to recognize "the possibility that nongovernmental and extrainstitutional public arenas—constructed principally by (often less-than-loyal) social movements—might be equally essential to the consolidation of meaningful democratic citizenship for subaltern social groups and social classes" (Alvarez 1997, 85). But if the civil society view has helped refocus our attention and has brought to light a range of political practices obscured by the institutionalist view, its engagement with the institutionalist literature suffers from two related shortcomings.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Bootstrapping Democracyby Gianpaolo Baiocchi Patrick Heller Marcelo K. Silva Copyright © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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