The political and economic effects of Brazilian participatory budgeting: intensification or degradation over time?

Spada, Paolo (2023) The political and economic effects of Brazilian participatory budgeting: intensification or degradation over time? In, Jacquet, Vincent, Ryan, Matt and van der Does, Ramon (eds.) The Impacts of Democratic Innovations. (Studies in Political Science) ECPR Press, pp. 209-231. (doi:10.61675/ksby3068).

Abstract

There are a number of arguments to support a more deliberative and participatory form of democracy. The World Bank1 claims that many of the key components of participatory and deliberative2 democracy are capable of inducing better local governance; deliberative and participatory procedures, they argue, can improve tax revenue and economic development, reduce corruption and, in the long run, may induce a more equitable distribution of income. From an empirical standpoint, there are many different experiences in local institutions, some along participatory lines, some deliberative, some combining both. Most of these experiments, like the Neighbourhoods Councils in Italy or the New England town meeting, seem to be incapable of maintaining a high level of participation in the long run. However, in the 1990s, some Brazilian cities began to implement a new form of budgeting based on participation that, in some instances, has been capable of sustaining thousands of participants and high level of inclusion of minorities for more than 20 years. Table 10.1, leveraging the Brazilian Participatory Budgeting Census, the original data I collected for this study, shows the number of cities implementing participatory budgeting (PB) in each year from 1989 to 2020.

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Contributors

Author: Paolo Spada

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