The Politics of Local Participatory Democracy in Latin America: Institutions, Actors, and Interactions

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Montambeault, Françoise, author.

The politics of local participatory democracy in Latin America : institutions, actors, and interactions / Françoise Montambeault.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-9516-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Local government—Mexico—Citizen participation—Case studies. 2. Democracy—Mexico—Case studies. 3. Local government—Brazil—Citizen participation—Case studies. 4. Democracy—Brazil—Case studies. I. Title.

JS2117.A2M66 2015

323'.0420972—dc23

2015011255

ISBN 978-0-8047-9657-6 (electronic)

The Politics of Local Participatory Democracy in Latin America

INSTITUTIONS, ACTORS, AND INTERACTIONS

Françoise Montambeault

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

To Victor and Elsa

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. How Does Success Vary? Redefining Democratic Success

3. Why Do Cases Vary? A Comparative Approach

4. Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl: Participatory Democracy or Clientelistic Participation?

5. León: Participation as Fragmented Inclusion

6. Recife: From Clientelism to Disempowering Cooption

7. Belo Horizonte: The Route Toward Democratic Cooperation?

8. Conclusion: Comparative Lessons for Participatory Democracy Theory

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

Doing research about participatory democracy and on mechanisms aimed at bringing citizens back into governance processes, I felt I needed to bring them in at the center of the story I was about to tell. The inspiration for this book has thus mainly been all those wonderful citizens I have had the chance to meet and talk with in Mexico and Brazil. They all have generously given me time and opened their homes to me, inviting me to discuss their experiences and to share a little bit of their lives. Municipal officials and bureaucrats from Neza, León, Recife, and Brazil have also been crucial in reconstructing the story of state-society relationships in all four cities, helping me with meeting people and so generously opening for me the archives and letting me attend participatory events and meetings. I am extremely grateful to all of them for letting me into the heart of their participatory processes to observe their institutions, actors, and interactions.

I have had the chance to work under the supervision of Philip Oxhorn, who has been a source of inspiration. Thank you for believing in me and for your tireless support throughout the years; it really made a huge difference. Your innumerable readings of my work, and your thoughtful support in the early stages of my career, have made me a much better scholar.

During the research for this book, I benefited from the financial support of several organizations and institutions. This whole adventure has been made possible by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), which provided financial support in 2004–2007 and again in 2010–11. The eight-month fieldwork I conducted in Mexico and Brazil was made possible by funding from the International Development Research Centre of Canada (IDRC) and the McGill Centre for Developing Area Studies (CDAS). I also had the support of the Faculty of Arts and the Department of Political Science at McGill University, which offered me a grant. I am also grateful for the support of my current institution, the Université de Montréal, which gave me a professor installment fund while I was writing the final version of this manuscript.

Doing research in the field is always an adventure, and both the academic support and great friends I could count on in Mexico and Brazil contributed to make these research and life experiences extraordinary ones. In Mexico, I am particularly grateful to Dr. Judit Bokser Liwerant, Dr. Irma Sandóval, and Dr. John Ackerman, for inviting me to join the research environment of the Faculdad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and its academic activities in the fall of 2007. I also want to thank Dr. Alicia Ziccardi and Dr. Patricia Ramirez Kuri, at the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales (IIS-UNAM); Enrique Cabrero Mendoza, at the Centro de Investigaciones y Docencia Económica (CIDE); and Tonatiuh Guillén Lopez at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, for the great conversations we had about local democracy in Mexico and my research. I am also thankful for having such wonderful friends in Mexico, who once again were an invaluable help and support. Aline, Nilbia, Juan Carlos, and Federico, thank you again for your precious friendship and for the endless conversations we had about Mexican politics and society that helped me understand another side of Mexico. I also want to thank Yaffa and Annie, without whom my stay in Mexico wouldn’t have been the same.

My stay in Brazil was extremely enriched by my many exchanges and discussions with everyone at the Projeto Democracia Participativa of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (PRODEP-UFMG), in Belo Horizonte, and especially Prof. Leonardo Avritzer, who welcomed me so warmly at the center in the summer of 2008 and supported me throughout my stay there and even beyond. I am also grateful to Prof. Celina Souza at the Universidade Federal da Bahia, Marcus Melo at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, and Vera Schattan Pereira Coelho at the Centro Brasileiro de Análisis e Planejamento (CEBRAP), for taking the time to discuss my research and help me in making contacts with key municipal actors. I also want to thank my friends in Belo Horizonte, and especially Stefano Stortone, my dear Italian colleague at PRODEP, with whom I had so much fun discovering Belo Horizonte and discussing Brazilian politics and participatory budgeting, as well as running (and sometimes getting lost!) around the city to attend PB meetings.

I would like to thank my editor at Stanford University Press, Geoffrey Burn, and his Editorial Assistant, James Holt, who both have been of tremendous help throughout the entire publishing process. The anonymous reviewers have given incredibly useful feedback on the manuscript, and pushed me to make it much better. I have also been lucky to benefit from the advices of many friends and colleagues in the past few years, who have generously accepted discussing ideas and findings and contributed to making the book much better. I am especially grateful to Phil Oxhorn, Brian Wampler, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Leonardo Avritzer, Tina Hilgers, Julian Durazo, Juliet Johnson, and Camille Goirand, from whose generous comments this work has greatly benefited over the years. My colleagues and friends at the Department of Political Science at the Université de Montréal are the best I could ever wish for. They have been extremely supportive throughout the final stretch of writing this book. I am particularly indebted to Marie-Eve Reny and Graciela Ducatenzeiler, who generously read and commented on the final version of the manuscript, and to Jane Jenson, whose mentorship has been invaluable in the past years. I am also grateful to Laurence Bherer, for great and engaging discussions on participatory democracy; to Pascale Dufour, for being such a passionate and inspiring colleague; and to Cynthia Milton, in the history department, who shares my passion for Latin America. Finally, special thanks go to my dear friends Magdalena Dembinska and Ece Atikcan, who have been both intellectually engaging and my support system throughout the Ph.D. years and continue to be, as my colleagues.

Family and friends are the hidden force behind the sometimes-tumultuous journey of academia: without their emotional and moral support, not much could actually be accomplished. I am extremely grateful to my old friends, my second family, for everything they are and represent to me. Elaine, Christine, Marie-Pierre, Vanessa, Elsie, Anne-Josée, Sarah, Denise, Marie-Claude, Kim, Marilou, Ann, Dan, Marco, Simon, and Etienne: your constant support and invaluable friendship help me in becoming a better person every day, and help me in going through all the experiences and questioning that come along with a career in academia, reminding me that life is not just about that. I am also grateful to my parents and sister, for always believing in me and giving me the tools and support to become the person I am today, and to my grandparents for being such a source of inspiration and an example of determination in my life.

A last and very special thank-you goes to Phil, my love, for making my life so much better every day and letting me pursue my dreams for all these years, always supporting me and following me in realizing them, whatever they were. Victor and Elsa came into our life as I was writing. They have been an inspiration since then, a driving force, both bringing me immense joy and perspective on life. This book is dedicated to them.

ONE

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 formal rules (Helmke and Levitsky 2006), but they also shape and constrain human behavior, as well as the nature of state-society interactions and democratic outcomes. Challenges to Mexican and Brazilian democratic regimes are, in fact, still very much linked to the prevalence and adaptation of clientelism to democratic institutions. More than a question of access to power through formal institutions, the quality of democracy depends on the exercise of power within those institutions (Mazzuca 2010), and on the capacity of institutional arrangements to curb clientelistic relationships between the state and society. Traditionally defined as a mode of interaction between politicians (patrons) and citizens (clients) that involves an unequal social exchange based on power and resources, clientelism is not static and could therefore survive a transition to democracy and adapt to the new context of competitive electoral politics. It can take differing forms and functions, and it can adapt to the new context of machine politics where parties become clientelistic machines (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1981; Roniger 1994). Here, traditional patron-client ties are incorporated into a broader institutional framework, usually the political parties (Lemarchand 1981). The exchange is, then, less understood in terms of a personal relationship between two individuals. It is, rather, defined by political parties and included within the activities of the elected governments, through targeted programs and policies that aim to secure the support of certain social groups. In post-transition Mexico, clientelism remained a strategy pursued by highly institutionalized political parties to gain or maintain political support among the population, most using their local social and political organization to bridge the gap between citizens and the party in view of securing votes (Shefner 2001; Hilgers 2008; Fox 1994). In Brazil, modern clientelism arose in the context of urbanization and changed the nature of client-patron relationships, also bringing them to the center of party politics and partisan-loyalty dynamics. Since 1985, clientelism has been used as a direct or indirect vote-buying strategy by local, state, and federal politicians seeking to maintain and extend their local support bases in a party system characterized by numerous political parties, changing loyalties, and the traditional weakness of popular organizations and mass-based parties (Mainwaring 1999).

As political pluralism rose in both countries, however, a new democratization discourse emerged among political parties, to which the idea of citizen participation became central. In democratization contexts, participatory democracy is indeed often assumed to potentially be transformative, creating institutional spaces for state-society relationships to be redefined by democratic practices (Hickey and Mohan 2005; de Sousa Santos and Avritzer 2004). It is argued to have the potential to empower civil society from below (Fung and Wright 2003), bring traditionally marginalized citizens together with the state in the public sphere for them to negotiate their access to the rights of citizenship (Hagopian 2007), and strengthen state accountability mechanisms (Ackerman 2003; Avritzer 2002; Heller 2001; Goetz and Jenkins 2001; Manor 1999), creating formal and direct ties between the local state and participating civil society organizations (CSOs). To be effective, local participatory institutions should, however, follow certain fundamental principles (Harbers 2007; Goldfrank 2008; Fung and Wright 2003, 2001): (1) they need to be institutionalized, included in the routine of the local government’s decision-making processes over specific and tangible public policy issues; (2) they must sustain and encourage face-to-face interaction and deliberation in public-sphere policy issues to generate solutions; and (3) although they are not necessarily located at the local level, they are often closely related to state decentralization processes.

Following these general principles, the design of the participatory reforms that were put forward in Mexico and Brazil is however different, given the countries’ local histories of mobilization and the contrasting ways by which clientelism needed to be coped with. In Mexico, clientelism is often a partisan practice that needs to be curbed by long-term planning processes going beyond a party’s or a mayor’s three-year mandate. Consequently, the new form of participatory governance that has emerged at the local level revolves around the general issues of urban planning and urban development, with city-based citizen committees acting as the voice of the population to inform city hall’s decision-making processes. In Brazil, budgeting has been an important tool for circumventing clientelistic resource distribution. In this case, participatory budgeting is thus the most important aspect of participatory democracy that has appeared with the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) in Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul) in 1988 and has since spread throughout the country and even beyond.

BEYOND THE HONEYMOON: UNDERSTANDING HOW AND WHY OUTCOMES VARY

If the conditions leading to implementation of institutionalized participatory democracy innovations and their diffusion across Latin America are now well documented, how their implementation transformed the state, civil society, and state-society interactions still needs to be further explored and explained both theoretically and empirically. Although studies of participatory democracy have flourished, many have undertaken single-case studies, which has generally led to an overoptimistic view of the democratization potential of such institutions (Abers 2000; Avritzer 2002; Fung and Wright 2003; Baiocchi 2005). As Avritzer rightfully said, the honeymoon seems to be over today, as scholarship enters a post-celebratory phase (Avritzer 2009b). Participatory institutions and mechanisms have spread around the world, but they are not a panacea against all of democracy’s ills. They have had mixed results in practice at the municipal level, between countries but also between municipalities within a single country, as in Mexico and Brazil. Recent empirical studies have indeed observed that the gap between the normative expectations underlying the arguments linking social participation to democratization—assuming that citizens are willing to participate actively when given the opportunity—and the reality of actual citizen participation is quite significant (Cornwall and Coelho 2007). The empowerment thesis has been questioned, and it is yet not clear whether new associations and civic organizations have directly resulted from participatory innovations (Nylen 2002, 2003) or have increased their capacity to organize through the process (Baiocchi et al. 2011). Moreover, in many cases, old practices of clientelism are likely to coexist with the new practices introduced through the process (Garcia-Guadilla and Perez 2002; Wampler 2007; Montambeault 2012, 2011).

Comparative perspectives have thus led authors to become more cautious about the positive link between institutionalized participation and democratization. The dominant comparative approaches, however, remain limited as they do not provide a thorough comparative analysis of participatory institutions (Wampler and McNulty 2011). If, for instance, they compare cases with differing outcomes, they focus on either cases across countries (Avritzer 2002; Goldfrank 2011) or within countries (Wampler 2007; Avritzer 2009b; Baiocchi et al. 2011; Selee 2011), without combining both types of comparison. Moreover, there is a lack of consensus in scholarship over the definition of democratic success and its underlying conditions.

The Arguments

The first question the book addresses is therefore, How do we assess success? Taking a comprehensive approach to understanding democracy, it argues that democratic success should be measured by the extent to which participatory democracy has contributed to transforming (or not) state-society relationships at the local level. Because participatory institutions generate new forms of interactions between the state and citizens, the assumption is that the focus of this analysis should be on how the relationship between the state and civil society emerges and develops through formal and informal interactions in the participatory process. Such a redefinition of success not only assumes that it is not a given, but also allows that there might be different degrees of success. As the cases presented here exemplify, there are significant discrepancies among cases across Latin America. This suggests that the traditional dichotomy between clientelism and citizenship cannot sufficiently address the issue of state-society relationships. In fact, as Latin American countries have generally transitioned toward a democratic regime favoring pluralism, social relations are more complex than the reality this dualistic spectrum can capture. Thus, by redefining success, this book not only contributes to a better understanding of how participatory democracy affects policy-making processes and outcomes or the number of associations they create, but also of how it reshapes (or not) formal and informal practices of local democratic governance.

The book thus starts from the premise that deepening democracy demands more than a mere institutional reform, rather a deep transformation of state-society relationships. Such relationships are defined by and thus vary along two dimensions: the types of mobilization patterns they encourage, and, more important, the level of autonomy observed in the practice of participation within these institutions. Four types of relationships can thus emerge: clientelism (particularistic mobilization and low autonomy), disempowering cooption (collective mobilization and low autonomy), fragmented inclusion (particularistic mobilization and high autonomy), and democratic cooperation (collective mobilization and high autonomy). Drawing from the comparative case study of participatory budgeting (PB) experiences in Belo Horizonte and Recife, in Brazil, and of participatory urban planning experiences in León and Nezahualcóyotl, in Mexico (see maps at the end of the chapter), the book shows that state-society cooperation has more potential than the other types to facilitate social inclusion patterns, greater state accountability, and consequently the deepening of democracy. Not only does it entail collective grassroots mobilization patterns that contribute to empowering civil society actors, but it also allows them to autonomously organize, to mediate between the state and society, and to formulate collective demands on the state through the formal channels of participation.

In Belo Horizonte’s PB program, the combination of both a change in the focus of mobilization patterns in the city and the increasing autonomy enjoyed by CSOs and other participants in the participatory process has contributed to transforming traditional clientelistic interactions into a model of equal cooperation between actors from both the social and the political spheres. Consequently, the blossoming of democratizing governance practices that help ensure that ordinary citizens—including the previously marginalized—are included in the social construction of the citizenship regime is observed. This