Gianpaolo Baiocchi

Participation, Activism, and Politics: The Porto Alegre Experiment and Deliberative Democratic Theory

This paper examines civic governance in Porto Alegre in terms of deliberative democratic theory, as outlined in Cohen (1997), Fung (1998), and Wright and Fung (1999). Civic governance in Porto Alegre has developed in the ten years of the municipal administration of the Workers’ Party (P.T.) into a complex system of participatory fora where citizens decide and deliberate upon a variety of municipal policies. The cornerstone of the system is the much-publicized Participatory Budget (Orcamento Participativo, O.P.), a neighborhood-based set of deliberative fora on the city’s budget priorities. Based upon interview and historical research as well as a survey I applied (n=1039), in this paper I seek to add to the substantive account of democracy at the center of theories of deliberative democracy. I argue that evidence from these institutions offer a robust defense of the potential of deliberative democracy in face of criticisms deliberation will foster domination of more powerful citizens. Instead, we have evidence of the didactic function of participatory governance in Porto Alegre. I also argue that the institutions of civic governance in Porto Alegre force us to re-examine and theorize the types of civil society-deliberative forum interfaces and the potential impacts of civic governance on civil society. Here, I argue that participatory governance has directly fostered the creation of new autonomous institutions of civil society. Finally, I also argue civic governance in Porto Alegre has flourished under two sets of conditions that may make it not immediately transportable to other contexts: that of an unusually endowed municipal government (for Brazilian standards) and the radical driving vision of Worker’s Party administrators.

Emergent Public Spheres: Talking Politics in Participatory Governance

This article addresses the question of whether and how participation in government promotes the conditions for participants to engage in the open-ended and publicminded discussion heralded by democratic theorists. Ethnographic evidence shows how participants in assemblies of the “participatory budget” in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, created open-ended and public-minded discussion in two of the city’s poor districts. The urban poor of Latin American have often been treated as unlikely candidates for democratic engagement, but in these meetings participants regularly carved out spaces for civic discourse and deliberation, deploying a language of the commonality of needs as a vocabulary of public interest. In a district with organized networks of civil society, experienced community activists played an important role in curtailing conflict, while in a district without such networks, the assemblies were severely disrupted at times by virtue of being the “only place in the community” that could serve as a staging ground for some participants to manage their reputations. A comparison with a prior period in both districts shows that before the budgeting assemblies were created it was difficult to sustain any kind of regular meeting place beyond individual neighborhoods to carry out these discussions. The notion of the “public sphere” is broadened, calling for a revision of the stark separation of state and civil society in democratic theory.

Participatory Budgeting as if Emancipation Mattered

Participatory Budgeting has by now been widely discussed, often celebrated, and is now instituted in at least 1,500 cities worldwide. Some of its central features—its structure of open meetings, its yearly cycle, and its combination of deliberation and representation—are by now well known. In this article, however, we critically reflect on its global travel and argue for more careful consideration of some of its less well-known features, namely the coupling of the budgeting meetings with the exercise of power. We disaggregate PB into its communicative and empowerment dimensions and argue that its empowerment dimensions have usually not been part of its global expansion—and this is cause for concern from the point of view of emancipation. We thus discuss the specific institutional reforms associated with empowerment in the original version as well as its analytic dimensions. We also address some of the specific dangers of a communication-only version of PB as well as some suggestions for reintroducing empowerment.

Anything but racism: how sociologists limit the significance of racism

Abstract The academic declining significance of race did not begin with William Julius Wilson’s work in the late 1970s. In this paper, we take a broad look at the methods mainstream sociologists have used to validate Whites’ racial common sense about racial matters in the post-civil rights era. Our general goal is to succinctly examine the major tactics sociologists have used to minimize the significance of racism in explaining minorities’ plight. Specifically, we survey how (1) most work on racial attitudes creates a mythical view on Whites’ racial attitudes, (2) the various demographic indices used to asses post-civil rights’ racial matters miss how race affects minorities today, (3) perspectives on the culture of minorities are based on ethnocentric perspectives that tend to hide the centrality of racially based networks, and (4) the way most sociologists report their results distorts the significance of racial stratification. We conclude by suggesting that work on racial matters will need to be revamped if it is going to have any practical use for those at the “bottom of the well.”

Making Space for Civil Society: Institutional Reforms and Local Democracy in Brazil

This paper contributes to the growing body of research on participatory democracy and the literature on associational democracy by exploring the impact that institutional reforms have on local-level configurations of civil society. In the 1980s a wide range of participatory experiments were initiated in Brazil, most notably Participatory Budgeting in municipal governance. Municípios that adopted PB in principle devolve much or all of the decision making on new investments to decentralized participatory forums. In this paper we consider the results of an eight-city matched-pair analysis conducted in 2004, in which we selected municípios that adopted PB in 1997-2000, and matched them with a similar município that did not in the same period, drawing from the full sample of municípios over 20,000 inhabitants. Building on relational theories of civil society, we show that PB has clear but limited effects on civil society. It moves civil society practices from clientelism to associationalism, but does not contribute to the capacity of civil society to self-organize, at least in the time-frame considered. We also show that this democratizing effect on civil society practices and networks is conditioned by pre-existing state-civil society relations.

The Civilizing Force of Social Movements: Corporate and Liberal Codes in Brazil's Public Sphere*

Analysts of political culture within the “civil religion” tradition have generally assumed that discourse in civil society is structured by a single set of enduring codes based on liberal traditions that actors draw upon to resolve crises. Based on two case studies of national crises and debate in Brazil during its transition to democracy, I challenge this assumption by demonstrating that not only do actors draw upon two distinct but interrelated codes, they actively seek to impose one or another as dominant. In Brazil this is manifest in actors who defend elements from the code of liberty and its valuation of the freestanding citizen, and those who defend the corporate code and its valuation of the collectivity over the individual. In an earlier debate on crime the corporate code was dominant, but in a later debate surrounding presidential improprieties, the liberal code became dominant. This analysis makes two contributions to the literature: it highlights the importance of nonindividualist cultural codes, such as the corporate code, in animating discourse in the public sphere in democratizing societies, raising attention to the importance of the symbolic contestation between actors seeking to establish one or another code during political transitions. Second, it offers a subtle commentary on the literature on democratization: changes in collective representations in the public sphere may not proceed apace of institutional changes and may be contingent on the kinds of crisis events and actors willing to contest previously dominant codes.

Disavowing Politics: Civic Engagement in an Era of Political Skepticism1

Today, Americans are simultaneously skeptical of and engaged with political life. How does widespread cynicism affect the culture of civic participation? What are the implications for democracy? This study synthesizes data from a one-year collective ethnography of seven civic groups and theoretical work on boundary making, ambiguity, and role distancing. The authors find skepticism generates “disavowal of the political,” a cultural idiom that allows people to creatively constitute what they imagine to be appropriate forms of engagement. Disavowal generates taboos, and the authors show how disdain for conflict and special interests challenges activism around inequality. Political disavowal both facilitates and constrains civic engagement in an era of political skepticism.

Synergizing civil society: state-civil society regimes in Porto Alegre, Brazil

In this paper I discuss the impact of participatory reforms to municipal governance on local civil society in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Carried out by administrators of the Workers Party (PT), these reforms have created a variety of empowered participatory fora on municipal policy. In contrast to a previous period of “tutelage” in which neighborhood associations vacillated between acquiescence and conflict with municipal government, these reforms have fostered new institutions in civil society, a greater interconnectedness between local organizations, and a ‘scaling up’ of activism away from solely neighborhood to city-wide concerns. To properly consider this impact I propose a ‘relational’ framework that considers the role of state-civil society relationships in creating an environment more or less conducive to civic involvement.

Co-designing and Co-teaching Graduate Qualitative Methods An Innovative Ethnographic Workshop Model

This article describes an innovative collaboration between graduate students and a faculty member to co-design and co-teach a graduate-level workshop-style qualitative methods course. The goal of co-designing and co-teaching the course was to involve advanced graduate students in all aspects of designing a syllabus and leading class discussions in a required course for first-year graduate students. The authors describe the multiple stages involved in designing and teaching the qualitative methods course and discuss the challenges of this type of collaborative teaching. This type of collaboration builds on the existing strengths of workshop-style methods courses to improve student learning by providing opportunities for grounded engagement with epistemological topics and ample opportunities for feedback, discussion, and reflection on the research process. This collaborative teaching model, although difficult and time-intensive, provides measurable improvements to existing qualitative workshop courses by overcoming some of the limitations of workshop courses and providing significant benefits for graduate students in the class, the student co-teachers, and faculty.

Conflicts and paradoxes in the rhetoric of participation

ABSTRACT The expansion of participation processes and techniques around the world in recent years takes place under the rhetoric of citizen empowerment. This rhetoric has been questioned by many scholars, who often point out the weak impact of such practices and the new games of domination to which participation is submitted. This article examines this dilemma from the expansion of participatory budgeting in the global North. We propose a study of assembly processes involving the local public administration in the cities of Chicago and Córdoba. This process reveals conflicts and paradoxes that often remain hidden in the research, but nevertheless show struggles to appropriate and define the meaning of participation.