The resurgence of the Left in Latin America over the past decade has been so notable that it has been called “the Pink Tide.” In recent years, regimes with leftist leaders have risen to power in ...Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela. What does this trend portend for the deepening of democracy in the region? Benjamin Goldfrank has been studying the development of participatory democracy in Latin America for many years, and this book represents the culmination of his empirical investigations in Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In order to understand why participatory democracy has succeeded better in some countries than in others, he examines the efforts in urban areas that have been undertaken in the cities of Porto Alegre, Montevideo, and Caracas. His findings suggest that success is related, most crucially, to how nationally centralized political authority is and how strongly institutionalized the opposition parties are in the local arenas.
This paper maps the gender balance in the discipline of political science in Latin America by examining data from 16 countries where we could find the number of female professors in political science ...departments (over 100 departments) as well as from 69 journals publishing political science research in Latin America and from 16 Latin Americanist journals in Canada, the United States, and Europe. We compare the proportion of female political science faculty members to the proportion of women serving as editors and as members of editorial and advisory committees for relevant academic journals. We find that a significant gender gap remains, both in political science departments and in journals, and that the gender gap is worse in journals based in Latin America than in those based outside the region.
The resurgence of the Left in Latin America over the past decade
has been so notable that it has been called "the Pink Tide." In
recent years, regimes with leftist leaders have risen to power in
...Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua,
Uruguay, and Venezuela. What does this trend portend for the
deepening of democracy in the region? Benjamin Goldfrank has been
studying the development of participatory democracy in Latin
America for many years, and this book represents the culmination of
his empirical investigations in Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In
order to understand why participatory democracy has succeeded
better in some countries than in others, he examines the efforts in
urban areas that have been undertaken in the cities of Porto
Alegre, Montevideo, and Caracas. His findings suggest that success
is related, most crucially, to how nationally centralized political
authority is and how strongly institutionalized the opposition
parties are in the local arenas.
Dentro de la gama de reformas enfocadas en la inclusión de los ciudadanos en América Latina, hay una grande variedad en términos de escopo, contenido, implementación y impacto real de estas ...experiencias. Este artículo compara los casos do Brasil y Venezuela, que fueron considerados modelos ejemplares en el campo de la democracia participativa por diferentes observadores, para indagar como e porque varían sus sistemas participativos en sus diseños y por qué dejaron de ser ejemplos. En resumo, sugerimos que las diferencias en el diseño se deben a los diferentes orígenes de los dos modelos en la transición democrática en Brasil y la crisis democrática en Venezuela. De sus resultados, más allá de las obvias consecuencias negativas de las recientes crises económicas, sustentamos que, por un lado, el sistema participativo brasileiro perdió sus raíces populares al mudar para una abordaje más organizacional y al escalar a un nivel macro, y por el otro, en Venezuela, las instituciones adquirieron una abordaje demasiado partidaria y se desenvolvieron a un nivel demasiado micro.
This article addresses the long-standing controversy over the World Bank’s role in the promotion of participatory budgeting (PB). Some on the left have celebrated the Bank’s funding and advocacy for ...PB as signifying the legitimacy or mainstream success of the process, while others see the Bank’s endorsement of PB as a sign that participatory budgeting is becoming watered down and losing its transformative potential, if it ever had such potential. This debate has mostly been an ideological one, and little research has been done to provide evidence to either side. The article is the first to address what the Bank is doing to promote PB and why. It makes six main points. First, the originators of participatory budgeting, the Workers’ Party in Brazil, is not promoting it as strongly as it used to. Second, the World Bank has become the most active promoter of PB (perhaps alongside the United Nations Development Program). Third, within the Bank, some promote PB as part of its fairly standard pro-market agenda, while others share many of the same goals as PB’s originators. Fourth, though the Bank has become very important for the diffusion of PB, overall PB remains marginal within the Bank. Fifth, the Bank has little influence over the eventual outcomes of PB in different countries because it has little or no control over many of the factors that affect PB in practice. And sixth, because PB’s effects have strong potential to be positive, the Bank’s role in promoting PB should be encouraged.
The three books reviewed here represent a new generation of rigorous scholarship on participatory institutions (PIs). They demonstrate that - under certain conditions - it is possible to build ...large-scale PIs that strengthen democratic governance and improve citizens' lives. Nonetheless, significant challenges remain. Due in part to the absence of either high-quality national-level comparative data or fine-grained subnational data, and in part to research design choices of existing studies, the literature remains limited in its capacity to make general claims about the causes and effects of large-scale PIs. Ultimately, the key question collectively addressed, but not fully answered, by the works reviewed is whether governments can build PIs that deliver on their promise to improve the quality of democracy and enhance public service provision on a large scale in diverse contexts beyond Brazil.
Participatory budgeting (PB) has been one of the most popular local democratic reforms in Latin America in recent decades. This article examines what happened to PB when it was scaled up to the state ...level and integrated in a participatory system in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (2011–14). Using theories of deliberative systems, multichannel participation, ‘venue shopping’ (the practice of seeking the most favourable policy venue) and countervailing power, as well as a multimethod research design, we explain how the systems approach allowed for both deliberation and direct democracy and mobilised new sectors to participate online. However, on the negative side, the different participation channels undermined each other. Social movements migrated to other spaces, leaving the budgeting process open to control by well-established, powerful public-sector groups.
Los estudios recientes dedicados a la ciencia política latinoamericana han tenido por principal objeto de investigación la institucionalización de la disciplina. Se ha avanzado mucho en el ...conocimiento de este tema, pero sin apenas incluir la perspectiva de género. Para incluirla, este artículo (1) estima la presencia de profesoras de ciencia política en 107 departamentos de 16 países de la región y (2) en los equipos y (3) consejos editoriales de 85 revistas de ciencia política o latinoamericanistas para luego (4) evaluar una encuesta de editores en 48 de estas revistas. Encontramos que hay una brecha de género significativa tanto en los departamentos como en las revistas (especialmente en los consejos editoriales), que no correlaciona con la institucionalización de la ciencia política. Además, la presencia levemente mayor en los equipos editoriales representa un arma de doble filo. La llegada de mujeres a estos equipos es una oportunidad para su reconocimiento profesional y para influenciar la disciplina, pero requiere trabajar más sin recompensa significativa, mientras que en el puesto más simbólico y menos demandante– el consejo editorial –hay menos mujeres.
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