Coming from a legacy of authoritarianism and low civic engagement, today's Brazil is known for the unique democratic trajectory, including several local participatory initiatives aimed at bringing citizens back at the centre of the democratic project. Is the Brazilian participatory experience a model for increasing participation in democratic processes? Can the Brazilian model be exported? More generally, under what conditions participatory institutions succeed? In his most recent book, Avritzer's ambitious goal is to start answering these questions, providing a theoretical framework for the current debates on the success of Brazilian participatory institutions as an alternative democratic model aimed at broadening citizen participation.
Arguing that democratic and civil society theories have generally overlooked participatory institutions, he proposes to fill this theoretical gap, developing a theory of participatory institutions that accounts for the relationship between civil society, the political society and institutional design. To do so, he looks at three types of institutions that have emerged in democratic Brazil: participatory budgeting, health councils and city planning processes operating under the Statute of the City. Although it has often been argued that bottom-up initiatives, like participatory budgeting, generate wider participation and better access to public goods, his provocative take on the question suggests that it is, however, not always the case. Drawing from a comparison of major Brazilian cities (São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre and Salvador), which display varying levels of success in implementing these three types of institutions, he argues for the importance of context in determining the conditions of success for each participatory institutions design.
Starting from the observation that, before 1970, Brazil was an authoritarian country with a weak public sphere and elitist political parties, the first section of Avritzer's book lays the foundations of the theoretical framework he develops to explain change in local democratic practices. More specifically, he proposes to look at patterns of change along three main dimensions that, together, have allowed the rise and success of local participatory institutions throughout the country: civil society, political society and institutional design. In chapter 2, he shows that the way civil society is organized at the local level is central to explaining its later ability to enter the participatory process. Because it remains dependent on political coalitions with the political society, success in implementing participatory institutions is most likely to occur when civil society emerged out of urban popular movements as the drive for participation is greater in these cases. He pursues this argument in chapter 3 by showing how the emergence of the Workers' Party (PT) in the 1970s has been crucial for sustaining renewed interactions between the civil and political societies in Brazilian cities, while highlighting that divisions within political parties lead to weak participatory institutions.
Keeping these contextual factors in mind, he therefore argues in chapter 4 that institutional design should vary and be adapted to the local organization of both the political and civil societies, a process that he calls interactive participatory designs. In the second part of the book (chapters 5–7) Avritzer starts to scrutinize and analyze the operation of all three types of institutions in practice, looking at the interplay of the three variables (civil society, political society and institutional design) in order to comparatively account for the differences in implementation outcomes he observes in the four municipalities under study.
Avritzer concludes in chapter 8 by proposing a typology of designs and contexts, highlighting that certain types of designs are better suited to specific contexts. More precisely, he shows how different combinations of political and civil society interactions within the three types of participatory institutions have led to their varying levels of success (or lack thereof) in the four cases. In cases where, as in Porto Alegre, there is unity in the political society about the need for participation and an active civil society able to seize the opportunities for participation, the likelihood for deeper forms of bottom-up participatory designs to be successfully implemented and to get positive echo in the wider society is greater. At the opposite pole, where there is division among political society actors about the idea of participation and civil society is unable to play its enabling role, as in Salvador, ratification institutions like city planning processes are more likely to emerge and succeed. Though its democratizing effect is less profound than in the case of bottom-up or even in power-sharing institutions, a ratification design is in effect better suited to hostile environments, illustrated by the case of Salvador, and, in the long run, has a greater chance of resulting into positive social inclusion and redistribution outcomes.
Avritzer's original contribution will likely become an important one among experts of participatory democracy. While it only focuses on Brazilian cases and does not attempt at generalizing to similar institutions implemented in other countries, this book contributes to a change of focus in the current debates on participatory democracy. The originality of Avritzer's contribution comes from the fact that he goes beyond the current literature, focusing primarily on participatory budgeting, and understands participatory institutions in democratizing Brazil as a whole, distinguishing between bottom-up, power-sharing and ratification participatory initiatives. Unlike previous research on participatory institutions, he does not fall into the “one-size-fits-all” trap, suggesting that there is no single successful recipe of participatory institutions that could be implemented everywhere. According to him, policy makers attempting to replicate the success story of Porto Alegre's participatory budgeting without regards to context are bound to fail: particular cultural and political variables proper to each local situation may, in fact, interfere with institutional features in the daily operation of participatory institutions, either fostering or hindering participation. His conclusions rather lead him to suggest that a good policy strategy would be to implement participatory institutions in stages, according to the context within which they are implemented.
Breaking with standard policy prescriptions, Avritzer's proposal is, however, not developed further and remains limited for policy makers who would want to follow his logic and successfully implement the most “democratic” participatory institutions. While he presents alternative models that, he argues, are better suited to “hostile environments,” Avritzer still suggests that bottom-up institutions are the most desirable form of participation, as the “most democratic and the most distributive” (174). However, because their success relies mostly on conditions existing prior to their implementation and that go beyond political will, bottom-up designs like participatory budgeting seem to hardly be exportable. It is hard to say from his findings if the favourable context underlying the success of Porto Alegre's participatory budgeting—a socio-political consensus based on the interactions between an historically active civil society and the willingness of local PT members—is likely to be found elsewhere. Even if he proposes that participatory institutions are most likely to succeed if implemented in stages (163), starting with ratification designs, the actual potential of such policy prescription to lead to greater and deeper participation remains unclear. Nonetheless, Avritzer's most recent book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in participatory democracy, including policy makers. Moreover, his work constitutes a creative theorizing work more generally relevant to scholars of democracy and democratization, carrying the current debates and academic discussions on the institutionalization of civic engagement and participation a step further.
