Introduction

The health of a democracy may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens. — ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, 1840

After extensive debates regarding the challenges of democratic transitions in Latin America, scholars have more recently moved their attention to the quality of democratic governance in the region. Democracy, they suggest, is not simply a mode for selecting political leaders, but rather a more complex system of governance founded on the principle of liberty and sustained by an effective rule of law equally applied to all (Diamond 1999; O'Donnell 2005) that should also be evaluated according to the quality of its procedures, content, and results (Diamond and Morlino 2005). Evaluated against these criteria, Latin American electoral democracies reveal their flaws. Competitive and regular elections may today be "the only game in town" (Linz and Stepan 1996), but governance processes and policy results have been characterized by weak state accountability mechanisms (O'Donnell 1998) and a pervasive dynamic of social exclusion due to differentiated and unequal access to citizenship rights (Oxhorn 2003). The democratization challenge is therefore still alive in Latin America, a region characterized by the persistence of clientelistic relationships, whose exclusionary nature creates different classes of citizens, fosters inequality, and as such curtails the deepening of democracy.

In the face of these challenges, what can be done to deepen democratic practices, to transform state-society relationships at the core functioning of democratic institutions? The strengthening of an autonomously organized civil society able to make the state accountable is vital to this transformation, especially in contexts characterized by traditionally low levels of autonomous civic engagement. Inspired by the lessons of the literatures on civil society, participatory/deliberative democracy, and social capital, the idea of including ordinary citizens' participation in decision making through formal institutional mechanisms has become an important locus of the democratic development strategy in Latin America. Building on existing scholarship, this book asks and answers two questions: Can institutional change enhance the quality of democracy in Latin America? More broadly, to what extent can institutional reform foster the development of an autonomous civil society capable of contributing to better quality democracy?

The Politics of Local Participatory Democracy answers these questions by focusing on one particular type of institutional democratic innovation: local participatory governance mechanisms. Around the world, many local governments, from the political left to right, have recently adopted reforms to create institutions for participatory democracy. These reforms formally include ordinary citizens' input in decision-making processes at the local level — the level of government where most citizens' demands are formulated. The existence of a positive association between the creation of such public spaces and the deepening of democracy is thus generally assessed via two complementary angles: the empowerment thesis and the accountability and government responsiveness arguments.

Examples of local participatory institutions include participatory budgeting, urban planning citizen councils, citizen oversight councils, and so on. These innovations are often cited as institutional expressions of a will to construct public spaces for civil society to engage in the governance process, for state-society interactions to flourish, and for local governments to become more responsive to local needs. Although there is an important body of literature addressing the relationship between participatory democracy and the deepening of democracy, compelling evidence from cross-national comparisons that provide an insightful assessment of the sociopolitical conditions underlying "success" are still lacking. More important, there is no agreement on the meaning and indicators of success. How is the assumed democratization potential of participatory mechanisms actually realized in practice? Under what conditions is such institutional change likely to succeed? The book develops a conceptual and comparative framework to better understand democratic success for participatory democracy institutions, and a set of theoretical tools that can grasp the variety of empirical realities observed in practice, drawing from the comparative study of four cases of participatory democracy in two countries, Mexico and Brazil.

THE PROMISE OF LOCAL PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY IN MEXICO AND BRAZIL

Though they have had quite different experiences with authoritarianism and democratization, both Mexico and Brazil share important sociopolitical dynamics and have undergone a transition to democracy during the past two decades, leading to the rise of political pluralism, the opening of the local and national electoral arenas, and the possibility of party alternation in power. In 1985, Brazilians elected their first civilian president since 1964. Tancredo Neves, from the traditional opposition party Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (PMDB), was elected as a result of a pact negotiated between the military regime, the official pro-military party Aliança Renovadora Nacional (ARENA), and the opposition (PMDB) for the apertura (opening) of the regime and the return of power to civilians after twenty years of military rule. The transition to democracy culminated in 1988, with the adoption of the new Constitution of Brazil. Mexicans have had a quite different story of democratization. In 2000, an election ended the seventy-year reign of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) — this after twenty years of gradual opening of the regime through a series of electoral and constitutional reforms adopted by PRI in search of renewed legitimacy. In 2000, Mexicans elected Vicente Fox from the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), in a presidential election that would leave the PRI in third place (after the leftist Partido de Revolución Democrática or PRD).

While following different trajectories toward the adoption of democratic institutions, Mexico and Brazil are both characterized by the predominance of informal institutions, a set of unwritten rules that exist outside and alongside formal ones (Helmke and Levitsky 2006). Informal institutions, though unwritten, are known for having a significant influence on formal rules (O'Donnell 1996): they can reinforce, subvert, or even supersede them. Not only do they provide incentives and disincentives to comply with...