A revolution in participation is sweeping Latin America. From community councils in Venezuela to participatory budgeting in major cities in Brazil and indigenous self-governance in Bolivia, institutions for participatory democracy are being adopted and put into practice, and in some cases, like Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela, enshrined in new constitutions. Within this dynamic landscape, Peru stands out as an early pioneer of participatory governance, but a laggard in implementation. On this point, Stephanie L. McNulty makes an important and nuanced contribution to our understanding by refocusing attention on the subnational level. In Voice and Vote, she documents how the process of decentralization in Peru has been accompanied by a remarkable experiment in participatory budgeting. She also analyzes less successful efforts to create Regional Coordination Councils (Consejos de Coordinación Regional, or CCRs) designed to link mayors and elected civil-society representatives in order to undertake regional development plans and budgets. These she calls participatory decentralizing reforms.
McNulty argues that following the crisis induced by the collapse of President Alberto Fujimori’s authoritarian rule in 2000, the newly elected democratic government of Alejandro Toledo gave new impetus to a process of decentralization that had begun earlier, in the 1980s, but with a twist: Democracy at the regional level would be reinforced through participatory innovations. With surprisingly little contention, and with the backing of the powerful Ministry of Finance, a push was made to encourage participatory budgeting as a way of promoting accountability and transparency at the local level. The CCRs were more controversial, and the debate around them more politicized, because key politicians opposed giving more power to civil society. Yet both innovations were incorporated into constitutional reforms in 2002, and were subsequently set out in implementing legislation. Much of Voice and Vote is devoted to explaining how these particular institutions emerged, why participatory budgeting was more successfully adopted than CCRs, which are weak and ineffective in most regions, and what accounts for variation across six of the major regions of Peru. The book concludes with a recommendation for advancing participatory decentralizing reforms.
I will spoil the suspense—but not, I hope, the inclination to read the book—by giving away the main findings: Strongly supportive regional leadership combined with coherent civil society organizations seem to have been crucial to the success of participatory decentralizing reforms in Peru. The success stories are Lambayeque and Cusco, while Ayacucho and Loreto are classified as unsuccessful; Moquegua and Cajamarca are moderately successful intermediate cases (p. 120). Experts on Peru will detect no obvious pattern in these pairings, which do not line up well in terms of the most obviously relevant socioeconomic or political factors, such as income levels, the size of regional investment budgets, levels of per capita spending, party politics, or other historical and social conditions. They do, however, align closely with the support of regional presidents for participatory institutions and with a well-organized and collaborative regional civil society. Compared with Robert D. Putnam’s Making Democracy Work (1993), this is an optimistic book in that it suggests that a virtuous circle leading to more participatory governance is possible when leadership interacts with a collaborative and organized civil society, despite substantial variation in historical tendencies to form civic organizations.
It is, perhaps, both a strength and a weakness of the book that it seeks to explain the “success” of the reforms on their own terms. Success is always difficult to define, and some readers may object to the decision to focus on such criteria as the number of meetings, level of attendance, and the gain of new powers over time to assess the success of CCRs. By the same token, the success of participatory budgeting is measured according to whether regional governments followed the methodology provided by the Ministry of Finance, whether and how civil society participation improved over time, and links between the budget and regional development plans (see pp. 84–85). These indicators provide clear and relatively easily operationalized criteria grounded in the legislation that created the participatory institutions. The downside is, however, equally apparent: They do not tell the reader much about the contributions of participatory exercises to social inclusion, citizenship, responsiveness of government, the undermining of clientelism, or other such goods.
A similar point could be made about the treatment of political parties. The book makes excellent observations about how parties generally embraced participatory budgeting, while some parties, especially the populist American Popular Revolutionary Alliance and the Right, vociferously opposed CCRs. This helps explain why participatory budgeting was more successful than the implementation of CCRs. The importance of support from parties is a point well taken, but there is a deeper problem worth exploring. The experience of participatory budgeting in other countries suggests that meaningful deliberation is possible only when political parties set aside partisan agendas. It is worth looking beyond the support or opposition of parties to participatory institutions to examine whether logics of partisanship can undermine these institutions even when (or, more precisely, because) parties embrace them.
Similarly, important academic and public debates on the tensions between participation and representation occasionally appear, but never come into sharp focus. To analyze whether participatory decentralizing reforms contribute to the simultaneous strengthening of participation and representation in some areas but not in others is an important task. McNulty provides us with examples of the ways in which participation can be used to improve governance. One can find little evidence in this book to suggest that participation has actually undermined representative institutions in Peru. Some Peruvians fault reformers for failing to strengthen representative institutions. It is unclear, however, that participatory institutions (which is not the same as, say, contentious social movements) have in any way weakened representation in Peru. If anything, the author seems to think that participation and representation can and should be mutually reinforcing, and she offers examples of elected populists’ tendencies to bypass participatory institutions as well as representative ones.
In terms of the scholarly contribution and research quality, Voice and Vote is an exemplar of systematic qualitative research using structured-focused comparisons at the subnational level based on evidence gathered during fieldwork. It is clearly written and cogently organized, with excellent tables and figures that meticulously summarize key findings and causal arguments. The research findings add to our knowledge of subnational politics, and advance the debate on participatory institutions generally. The book also fills a gap in the literature on political institutions in Peru by offering a highly informative account of decentralization. Finally, it makes a contribution to a central problem of the social sciences: how institutions emerge and change. Two lessons merit special emphasis. First, leadership matters—a point that often emerges from the careful study of policy processes. Second, even where reforms are implemented from above, the interaction between the state and civil society is critical to the kind of reforms that create more robust participatory institutions.
