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Title: Practicing Radical Democracy Author: Rebecca Abers Date: 1998 Language: en Topics: municipalism, municipal government, Brazil, democracy, the city Source: Paper presented at the Workshop: Insurgent Planning Practices – Perugia, Italy, June 21-27, 1998. To be published in Plurimondi, Vol. 1, No. 2. 199
Since the late seventies, a growing critique of the "statism" prevalent
in both the socialist and social-democratic Left has led many
progressive scholars and activists to declare "civil society" the
privileged sphere of emancipatory social change.[1] Experience suggests
that the redistributive state envisioned by the Left tends to be rigid,
technocratic and ultimately, authoritarian. "New Left" democratic theory
has therefore increasingly called for combining the pursuit of economic
and social equality with increased citizen participation in public life
and the celebration of social diversity. But more often then not, the
literature has envisioned civil society rather than the state as the
sphere where such an inclusive, egalitarian, participatory "radical
democracy" is most likely to emerge. Models for a radically democratic
state usually describe distant utopias in which widespread citizen
participation is possible because social inequality and political
alienation have been already eliminated.[2] But such models rarely make
clear what would be necessary to "get there from here."
This paper seeks to show how actual attempts to "radically democratize"
governance can shed light on what might kind of transformative practice
is possible by state actors in the "here-and-now." When they do gain
some control of the state apparatus, radical actors are forced to
confront the contradictions between utopian aspirations and present day
conditions. Obviously, successful attempts to overcome these dilemmas
are few-and-far between. But those few examples can tell us many things
about practicing radical democracy that abstract theorizing cannot.
Perhaps surprisingly, some of the most innovative thinking on a new
progressive model of state action is coming from a country typically
considered to be on the political, economic, and theoretical periphery.
One of the only growing "democratic socialist" parties in the world is
Brazil's Worker's Party (PT) — a heterodox political coalition that has
been expanding on Brazil's political scene since the early 1980s. Many
sectors of the PT, in some regions the majority of the party
bureaucracy, continue to preach "big state" doctrine, avidly opposing
the "flexibilization" of public employment and the privatization of
state-owned businesses. But where the PT has reached elected office in
Brazil it has tended to experiment with creative alternatives for
governance that challenge such bureaucratic traditions and promote a
participatory, redistributive, and inclusive "radical democracy".
When, in 1980, the Brazilian military regime (1964-1985) first allowed
the creation of new parties, a coalition of radical labor unions, urban
and rural social movements, and formerly revolutionary Marxist political
groups that now rejected violent action decided to found a new type of
socialist party. From the beginning, the PT repudiated ties to the
Soviet Union and sought a democratic road to socialism that would
preserve diversity, civil liberties, and tolerance. A coalition of a
variety of social groups, it also questioned traditional socialist
doctrine, seeking to include a variety of actors other than the
industrial working class into its project for change. During the first
decade of its existence, the PT created a name for itself as an
important locus of political opposition in Brazil, articulating the
concerns of a wide spectrum of social movements and political groups
that demanded social justice for the poor and criticized the corruption
and clientelism that was the status quo in Brazilian politics.
In 1988, the party made its first major electoral inroad, winning 36
municipal governments, including three state capitals, Porto Alegre,
Victoria, and most importantly, the huge megalopolis, SĂŁo Paulo. In the
following year, the party's national leader, Luis Inácio "Lula" da
Silva, lost the country's first direct presidential elections in nearly
thirty years by only a small margin, generating massive popular support
for the PT, particularly in the more developed southern and southeastern
regions of the country. Although it lost the presidency, the prefeituras
(municipal governments) that the party now controlled became important
proving grounds in which the PT could test out its ideals. Many would
agree that the most successful of these "Popular Democratic" governments
has been in Porto Alegre, a regional capital of 1.3 million inhabitants
in the far south of the country where the PT is currently in its third
consecutive term in office. My reflections on the PT's contribution to a
politically viable "radical democratic" redefinition of the state come
largely out of the Porto Alegre experience where I conducted research
over the course of several years including extensive participant
observation and over 100 interviews with government officials,
neighborhood activists, and non-governmental organization staff.[3]
PT ideology is rather contradictory, which is not surprising given the
multiplicity of groups making up the party. Over the first decade after
its foundation, a consensus emerged around two "mottos" for governing:
"participação popular" or grassroots participation and "invertendo
prioridades", literally, "inverting priorities" of government policies
away from the privileged classes that have traditionally benefited from
them and towards the poor. But despite this consensus, a constant
struggle has dominated party debates about what specific groups should
be included as the participants and beneficiaries. More orthodox sectors
of the party see organized workers as the principal targets of PT
policy-making and generally reject the idea of making alliances with
moderate political parties and middle class or business groups. More
heterodox and moderate groups are more inclusive, focussing on not only
organized working- class sectors, but also on the un-organized,
informally employed poor and on the middle class. They are also much
more prone to accept the political need to make alliances in order to
survive electorally. In recent years, the former group has tended to
capture the majority of posts within the party bureaucracy. But the more
heterodox groups have been more successful in electoral terms and have
thus dominated the way PT governments have evolved in practice. In part
because they thus grow out of real experiences with governing, that is,
out of an effort to reach a broad electorate and to survive in office, I
believe that the experiences of these governments can provide much
insight on how the Left can practically promote something that at least
moves towards an ideal of radical democracy.
Since it first came to office in 1989, the Porto Alegre prefeitura has
been one of the PT administrations most successful at implementing
policies adhering to the two party mottos. In the first place, the
government dramatically opened up government decision-making to citizen
participation. Most big cities in Brazil have in recent years created
citizen councils to monitor or approve major planning efforts. But few
of these councils have real decision-making power and they are rarely
formed out of an open, widely participatory mobilizing process. In many
cases, "community" members are nominated by government authorities or,
at best, specific civic groups — such as certain non-government
organizations, unions, universities, and businesses — are bequeathed the
right to send their representatives.
The Porto Alegre administration has gone much further. It has developed
an entirely "bottom-up" system of participatory governing in which
openly elected forums have a great deal of deliberative power over an
expanding number of policy arenas. The central participatory policy is
the "participatory budget": a system of decision-making that gives power
over public resource allocation to forums elected at neighborhood-level
assemblies and at open "thematic" meetings. This system has grown in
scope and power over time, at first largely addressing decisions about
community level capital expenditures and eventually gaining
decision-making power over major capital investments, service and
maintenance programs and personnel issues. At the top of the
participatory pyramid is a Municipal Budget Council, elected in open
assemblies, which has final say over the entire budget proposal that the
mayor sends to the city council each year for approval. Alongside the
budget forums, most city departments have also formed special councils
in areas such as transportation policy, housing, culture and health
care. These councils are all open to the participation of ordinary
citizens, requiring neither special technical qualifications or official
nomination. Over the nine years that the PT has held office in Porto
Alegre, citizen participation has been in constant expansion, as more
and more city agencies have created citizen forums and more and more
local residents have joined them. Each year, over 15,000 people attend
Participatory Budget assemblies alone, with about 1,000 of them taking
part in year round forums that meet regularly.
In the second place, the Porto Alegre administration has presided over a
dramatic redirectioning of government priorities, focussing a large part
of policy-making towards the needs of the poor. This process began with
a massive effort to raise revenues, which occurred in Porto Alegre by
raising rates and reassessing values for the two taxes under municipal
control: the tax on revenues in the service sector and the urban
property tax. Over the first four years of the administration, city
revenues almost doubled. A government that began with nearly 100% of its
revenues earmarked to cover payroll now had 20% of revenues for
"discretionary" spending.[4] With these funds, the government could give
special attention to capital investments in poor neighborhood that
historically in Brazil have been abandoned by the state.
Like other Brazilian cities, Porto Alegre has a large urban periphery
and many hillside slums that prior to the PT's arrival were desperately
lacking in basic infrastructure and services such as public
transportation, running water and sanitation, paved streets, garbage
collection and so on. In the last nine years, however, water and sewer
services have been extended to all but a tiny percentage of
neighborhoods. Bus services have reached neighborhoods that were
previously unattended. Extensive efforts have been made to legalize
squatter areas and to transform disorganized settlements into
neighborhoods. The result has been to dramatically transform the quality
of life of some areas of the city. With paved streets, bus lines, trash
collection, flood control and sanitation, places previously perceived as
"dangerous" and "inaccessible", where residents had to trudge long
distances through the mud to reach public transportation, became
integrated parts of the city. The administration has dramatically
improved in municipal schools — widely perceived as much better than
those in the parallel state-government school system. It has funded
community-run day care centers and adult literacy programs and has
installed health clinics in distant neighborhoods. Virtually all
decisions about which neighborhoods and regions of the city would
receive what types of benefits has occurred through the highly
representative participatory budget process, or through other sectoral
councils, with citizen groups closely monitoring the details of project
design and implementation.
In a country where a hierarchical political machine has largely
benefited elite groups and where poor people's access to government
officials is typically mediated by a highly personalistic and arbitrary
clientelist system, the participatory, redistributive government of the
Porto Alegre administration is indeed impressive. Yet, I would argue,
the ideas of participação popular and of inversão de prioridades are not
enough to present a useful model of radical democracy: it is in the
process of implementing these ideas that the Porto Alegre administration
provides us with some clues for what a radically democratizing project
would be in today's world.
One of the central problems with socialist ideology is that it often
assumed that redistribution could not be arrived at democratically since
it would require a violent crushing of the elite groups that would most
certainly have more resources to dominate any electoral process. Many
theorist of participatory democracy have suggested that genuine
participation is only possible once social inequalities have been
eliminated. But if violent, revolutionary or authoritarianism methods of
achieving social equality are rejected, then "how to get there from
here" becomes less clear. If radicalism is also democratic, if
redistribution must be combined with open participation, then the road
to radical democracy must pass through existing power inequalities,
dealing with them democratically. This requires jumping some difficult
hurdles. If those to whom one wishes to distribute are not well
organized, how to prevent an open participatory process from being
controlled by those who are already more powerful? If redistributing
government resources means taking benefits away from those with access
to money and media, how to "invert government priorities" and still win
elections? The remainder of this paper will look at how the Porto Alegre
administration responded to such problems, in the attempt to develop
some criteria for how to overcome these dilemmas.
Participation is unlikely to bring about redistribution if the poor are
not mobilized. This fact has been widely noted in the empirical
literature: in case after case, middle class and elite groups dominate
participatory forums because it is they who are best organized. Even
where the poor do participate, it is often a select group of organized
associations who, through the very process of participation tend to gain
even more capacity to dominate citizen forums while those groups that
are not organized initially find it increasingly difficult to make it in
the door. In Porto Alegre, however, the central participatory forum, the
Participatory Budget, drew principally poor people. In fact, the income
levels of participants were significantly lower than the population as a
whole.[5] As a result, the policy disproportionately benefited poor
neighborhoods rather than wealthy ones because they were the ones that
sent the largest numbers to the assemblies and that elected the largest
numbers of delegates to the district forums and to the municipal budget
council. What is more, within a few years after the policy was
initiated, most of those neighborhoods that participated were ones that
prior to 1989 had little or no experience with civic mobilizing. All
this contrasts most experiences with participation, where the wealthy
and most organized dominated citizen councils.
This mobilization of the poor and of the previously unorganized occurred
for a variety of reasons. In the first place, since participation
initially focussed on basic community infrastructure, the process began
by directly responding to the demands of poor neighborhood
organizations. Demands for neighborhood infrastructure had long been the
subject of demonstrations and protest and several regions of the city
had developed strong popular organizations to defend these demands. The
issues involved in the Participatory Budget were, therefore, immediately
meaningful and understandable to poor neighborhood residents. At the
same time, they were not particularly interesting to middle class
neighborhoods, which for the most part already enjoyed access to such
basic infrastructure, or to business groups that would seek government
investments in other areas. This initial focus on an arena immediately
attractive to the poor contrasts many other experiments with
participation that opened up public discussion on subjects about which
poor people have little understanding or that put the poor in direct
competition with better off groups who had more resources to articulate
their demands. In Porto Alegre, participation only expanded to such
arenas after a strong mobilization had occurred around basic
neighborhood infrastructure. For example, four years after the budget
policy was initiated, a series of "thematic" forums were incorporated
into the budget process to discuss issues such as transportation policy
and economic development. These forums attracted substantially more
middle class residents and business groups, but also drew poor
residents, who were able to be effective participants in part because of
the skills they had acquired through experience with the
neighborhood-based process.
While on the one hand, the policy attracted the poor, it was also able
to work against the tendency of citizen forums to be dominated by those
groups that happen to be organized at the time participation is
initiated. At first, the main participants in the budget forums were
indeed associations representing those poor regions of the city that had
organized over the course of the decade before the PT came to office.
But the Participatory Budget system also worked. As word spread that the
Porto Alegre administration was investing in projects prioritized by
neighborhood assemblies, innumerable new neighborhood groups formed and
joined the process. Once again the thematic focus of the policy spurred
on this mobilization. For the most part, the type of investments made —
such as paved streets and new schools — were highly visible. Many
participants I interviewed declared to have joined the budget assemblies
only after they saw such projects being implemented in adjacent areas
and went to local authorities or community groups to inquire about how
they could receive such benefits for their own neighborhoods. Upon
hearing that only those groups that participated in the budget
assemblies had a chance at receiving such projects, they began to
organize their neighborhoods. Many skeptical residents of poor
neighborhoods — whose ingrained distrust of politician's promises might
have kept them from "wasting" precious time on participation — came to
believe that the policy had credibility and that civic action might be
worthwhile because of this "demonstration effect."
At the same time, the government made specific efforts to draw new
neighborhoods into the process when they did not find out about the
policy on their own. The prefeitura employed a league of civic
organizers — usually experienced neighborhood activists themselves — to
mobilize residents and to provide information on how to participate.
Often, these organizers would make visits to neighborhoods that had not
sent representatives to the budget assemblies and would help incipient
groups to rally support and bring together residents. One could say that
these state-employed organizers took the place of the "external agents"
(priests, students, non-government organizations) that had historically
played a critical role in helping poor people's movements in Brazil and
elsewhere gain strength: they provided information and skills that
helped people overcome the barriers to participation.
Many authors have argued that participation is "developmental": through
the very experience of participation, people learn the skills that they
need to participate effectively.[6] In Porto Alegre, the government
capitalized on this potential for "social learning" to insure that
participation would have a distributional effect by "starting small," by
focussing on policy arenas that were particularly attractive to the
poor, and by investing both financial and human resources in ways that
drew the poor and unorganized into the process.
A second dilemma of implementing radical democracy for which the Porto
Alegre case provides some insight has to do with the bureaucracy. When a
new party comes to office, only the high and some of the middle echelon
posts are taken over by party nominees. The remainder are typically
permanent administrative posts, made up of people who cannot be easily
laid off. Participatory policy-making challenged technocratic traditions
that are particularly strong in Brazil. Experts responsible for
designing and implementing infrastructure projects and other services
were now asked to take commands from ordinary citizens. What is worse,
they needed to work with people, most of whom had little formal
education, explaining the technical details of each project demanded,
negotiating time limits and technical criteria. Often this meant meeting
with community groups in distant neighborhoods and outside of normal
working hours and listening to often scathing critiques and challenges.
Transforming a rigid, hierarchical bureaucracy into a flexible,
responsive organization capable of attending the often idiosyncratic
demands of citizens would not be easy.
In Porto Alegre, there were several reasons that the administration was
able to adapt the city bureaucracy to new ways. In the first place, the
administration always paid comparatively high wages, even when this came
at tremendous cost. In the first year of the government, for example,
the government was faced with a payroll that accounted for nearly 100%
of revenues, a result of the fact that the previous mayor had
dramatically raised wages in his last days in office,. Rather than
reducing wages and risking the wrath of the public employees union, the
government maintained the rates inherited from the previous
administration, even though that this meant that there would be no funds
available for investments or service expansion until revenue levels
could be raised, a process that took over a year. The result was low
approval rates in public opinion surveys, but a generally satisfied work
force and a labor union that backed the administration.
This fairly peaceful relationship did not mean, however, that the city's
civil servants went along easily with the changes in decision-making
that the participatory budget policy involved. Certain agencies, most
importantly the Secretariat of Planning, were characterized by an
entrenched technocratic bureaucracy that largely disapproved of the idea
of giving decision-making power to ordinary people. The agency heads I
interviewed generally noted that although outright sabotage of the
decisions made by budget participants was very rare, at times employees
resisted designing or implementing projects that challenged technical
norms. Despite these problems, a substantial sector of the bureaucracy
generally supported the PT administration. The vision expressed by a
number of employees I interviewed was one of appreciation of the
administration's invigorated governing capacity. Since civil servants
were the ones who would have to live with the government's mistakes long
after the elected government hierarchy would leave office, they
typically preferred a competent government that invested, without
corruption, in properly-designed and well-maintained projects.
Even with this relatively widespread support within the bureaucracy, the
workload of organizing participatory policy was largely born not by the
civil servant bureaucracy, but by a fleet of appointed employees.
According to the agency heads I interviewed, most public employees did
not object to receiving participants and responding to their questions
and problems during the ordinary hours of the workday and in their
offices. But, with a few exceptions, they largely refused to work nights
and weekends, attending assemblies and meetings all over town. This
outreach work, which was essential for making the participatory process
function, was largely carried out by the about 300 appointed employees
named by the Mayor and agency heads. The community relations personnel
in most departments were either appointed or were PT militants who
happened to have passed the civil service exam. It was they who attended
community meetings, articulating the complex exchange of information
between city agencies and participants. Agency heads and their closest
advisors also were extremely active at nights and weekends, attending
meetings to answer questions at the budget forums. Much of the success
of the participatory budget policy was a result of the administration's
investment in this constant "pounding the pavement" as administration
personnel dedicated enormous amounts of time to communicating directly
with participants about the details of government actions. The burden of
this "on-the-street" activity was born, however, by a small minority of
the municipal employees, for the most part PT militants in appointed
positions.
This use of "ideologically mobilized" personnel has to a large extent
been effective at insuring government responsiveness to participants.
But certainly this solution to the problem of transforming bureaucracy
has its limitations. Over time, those militants who joined the
administration with a strong sense of urgency and purpose are likely to
wear out, either to seek less demanding employment or to insist that
their jobs conform to something closer to the forty hour work week.
Furthermore, there are practical limitations to the amount of outreach
work that a few hundred employees can do. As participation in Porto
Alegre has gone from the "small phase" of discussing primarily
neighborhood level investment to the "big phase" of debating long-term
policy goals and city-wide issues, the need for popular education and
close regular, contact between technical personnel and participants has
only grown.
To be able to grow with the policy, the administration will have to
institutionalize bureaucratic flexibility to a greater extent than it
has yet done. Tendler (1996) has suggested some of the ways that
government bureaucracies may make such changes, arguing that state
agencies need to follow the lead of certain cutting-edge industries. In
a study on the state of Ceará in Brazil, she has shown how increasing
worker autonomy, customizing each job to specific situations, involving
workers in multiple and varying tasks, and promoting a culture of
respect for public employees can help bureaucracies become more
responsive and flexible, and thus more capable of working with citizen
participation. Porto Alegre would do well to experiment with some of
these ideas.
The new priorities of the PT administration in Porto Alegre obviously
had a great deal of impact on groups outside as well as inside the
government bureaucracy. To implement the kinds of grassroots,
participatory, redistributive policies the PT called for would require
raising revenues and using them to benefit groups that had previously
seen only a tiny minority of public funds: poor neighborhoods requiring
basic infrastructure. This meant that other groups lost priority for
benefits or paid higher taxes and fees to the prefeitura. Property
owners were faced with significant tax increases and the elimination of
traditional amnesties and exceptions that had historically been handed
out as patronage by political leaders seeking to secure elite political
support.[7] The city assembly, accustomed to adding in innumerable
amendments to pay back supporters, would now both be asked not only to
vote for controversial tax increases and but also to approve in its
entirety a budget that has been designed by highly representative
citizen forums. Finally, middle class neighborhoods and central
commercial areas that historically received the bulk of city services
and projects would lose priority. Yet property owners, the middle and
business class, the city council were all extremely influential in city
politics. They had control over the media and provided critical
financing to political candidates. How was a city government to take
benefits away from them and still expect to get critical legislation
through city council, no less to win the next election?
How the Porto Alegre administration acquired the political backing to
implement policies that benefited the poor is a very complex story that
cannot be easily summarized in a few paragraphs. In essence, I would
argue, the administration was able to build an alternative coalition of
political support that included not only poor and working class sectors,
but also what could be referred to as the "progressive" middle class. In
addition, while its policies damaged some sectors of the economic elite,
other business sectors benefited. This mixed group of supporters was
sufficiently influential to be able to pressure the city council to pass
critical tax and budget legislation. It also meant that media, while not
exactly friendly to the administration, did not engage in the kind of
blitzkrieg seen in other places where Left parties have come to office.
Three important components of this alternative coalition should be
emphasized. In the first place, as already noted, the budget policy had
a dramatic mobilizing effect. While this effect helped insure that the
policy reached large numbers, it also indirectly fostered a mobilized
support network on the city's periphery. This helped the administration
politically in two ways. On the one hand, those who received benefits
for their neighborhoods through the budget process (as well as those who
did not receive benefits but had come to believe through participation
that the administration's mode of distributing resources was legitimate
and fair) would mobilize public opinion in favor of the administration
at election time. On the other hand, participants also pressured the
city council to pass legislation critical for the implementation of
their budget proposals. Many council members had come to office with the
help of community leaders on the periphery who, according to clientelist
traditions, had long mobilized support for particular politicians in
exchange for promises that their neighborhoods would benefit should
their candidates be elected.[8] All too often, these same leaders now
participated in the budget assemblies, which proved to be much more
reliable forms of negotiating with those in power. Even if they did not
change their party sympathies (which many did), they now exerted
pressure on the council members they helped elect to insure that the
budget they had designed was approved.
In the second place, the policy was able to generate the support of
certain sectors of the business class, most notably construction
agencies. This group, often seen as extremely conservative and complicit
in corruption schemes in Brazil, initially boycotted the administration.
But, as it became clear that the government was prepared to spend
significant sums on civil construction, the companies began to break the
cartel to take advantage of the new contracts that the administration
was offering. Ultimately, these companies provided essential, albeit
veiled, elite support for tax increases that would increase revenues
which would be used to build infrastructure. They also counterbalanced
the influence of the city's speculative land owning elite over the
media, which avoided coverage of the administration, but for the most
part did not engage in active campaigns against it.
In the third place, the PT in Porto Alegre enjoyed wide-spread support
from the middle class. Indeed, opinion surveys showed that the
administration's approval rate increased according to income. My
research suggested that there were two major reasons for this approval.
On the one hand, the PT prefeitura insured that a substantial portion of
increased revenues and administrative energy went towards maintaining
high quality services in the center city: public transportation, trash
collection, street repair and the like dramatically improved after the
PT came to office. Opinion survey's showed that middle class voters saw
the administration as a "competent" and "efficient," administration that
effectively provided essential services. On the other hand, the
participatory efforts of the administration, although largely attracting
lower income residents, had much support among the middle class who
identified the PT with "democracy", "transparency" and "social justice".
At a period in history when corruption scandals were rampant in the
media, leading in 1992 to the impeachment of the nation's president,
these characteristics were seen as extremely positive by a growing
progressive middle class that was tired of government mismanagement and
chicanery.
All this suggests that it is possible for radical governments to gain
sufficient political support when their policies are designed,
implemented and advertised in ways that are broadly inclusive. I am not
suggesting that it is necessary to "pay off" the rich and the middle
class, making concessions to them even if they detract from radical
objectives. To the contrary, the Porto Alegre administration creatively
implemented its ideals in ways that incorporated the interests of a
"critical mass" of poor, middle class and business groups. By being
responsive to participant demands, the government generated support
among participants. By engaging certain business sectors in the
implementation of participatory projects, it built support among some
elite groups. And by building a reputation as a competent, uncorrupt,
transparent and socially responsible administration, the PT found
support among an enlightened middle class that was particularly
frustrated with traditional forms of governing at that historical
moment. In this way, instead of being a political burden that brought on
opposition, participatory, redistributive policies were actually an
asset that helped generate political support.
Many theorists have argued for an inclusive, participatory, egalitarian
state, but have said little about "how to get there from here". The
in-depth examination of one "real-life" attempt to "radically
democratize" the state can help us elaborate more realistic models of
transformative action. This paper has suggested that under certain
conditions, policy-making can promote radical democracy even if existing
social and political conditions are far from ideal. But this can only
occur if radical policy itself is used not only to implement an "ideal
model" but to help transform conditions so that the ideal model becomes
more feasible. Here I have suggested that making the state both
participatory and redistributive at the same time requires that radical
policy have at least three transformative objectives:
decision-making power, but also to mobilize the unorganized and the
poor, so that they to will benefit from the policies. Doing so is not
something that has to be done prior to implementing participatory
policy, but can occur through "social learning" process of participation
itself.
must become more flexible and responsive, capable of custom tailoring
projects to participant demands and of disseminating information and
skills to ordinary citizens.
traditionally excluded groups must have widespread political support if
they are to be long lasting. Progressive political groups must discover
how to creatively use policy-making to attend the interests of a wide
spectrum of groups without "selling out" their radical programs.
These reflections on one successful experience thus suggest that a
successful radical project should not only seek to promote participation
and redistribution (or participação popular and inversão de prioridades
in the PT lexicon) but also must find ways to gain the support of the
unorganized, of the middle class, of government employees and of
potentially-progressive business sectors. In many political situations,
gaining the backing of such a broad spectrum of actors may be impossible
to achieve without renouncing essential principals. Learning the art of
maintaining this fragile balance should be the primary goal of those who
seek to put radical democracy in practice.
Abers, Rebecca, 1996. "From Ideas to Practice: The Partido dos
Trabalhadores and Participatory Governance in Brazil." Latin American
Perspectives, 91(23):35-53.
Abers, Rebecca, 1997. Learning Democratic Practice: Distributing
Government Resources Through Popular Participation in Porto Alegre,
Brazil." In Cities for Citizens: Planning and the Rise of Civil Society
in a Global Age, edited by Michael Douglass and John Friedmann, 39-65.
Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley & Sons.
Alvarez, Sonia, 1993. "'Deepening' Democracy: Popular Movement Networks,
Constitutional Reform, and Radical Urban Regimes in Contemporary
Brazil." In Mobilizing the Community: Local Politics in the Era of the
Global City, edited by Robert Fisher and Joseph Kling. London, Sage.
Barber, Benjamin, 1984. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a
New Age Berkeley, University of California
Banck, Geert A. 1986. "Poverty, Politics and the Shaping of Urban Space:
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[1] See for example Cohen and Arato (1992: 417) and Laclau and Mouffe
(1985)
[2] See for example, Barber (1984), Cohen and Rogers (1983), Dahl
(1985), Green (1985), and Held (1987 (last chapter)).
[3] For more on PT history and ideology, see Gadotti & Pereira (1989),
Keck (1992), and Meneguello (1989). On the experiences of other PT
administrations, see Abers (1996), Alvarez (1993), and Nylen (1996,
1997).
[4] See Cassell and Verle (1994) for a detailed description of revenue
raising in the Porto Alegre administration.
[5] As confirmed by the comparing the results of a sample survey I
conducted in 1995 (in collaboration with two NGOs and the Porto Alegre
Administration) to 1991 census data for the municipality.
[6] See especially Pateman's (1970) classic work.
[7] The tax on services was also an important source of revenue
increases in Porto Alegre, but were much less controversial since they
were simultaneously raised in all state capitals (as part of an
agreement of capital mayors) and since they did not affect traditional
local elites. The largest service tax payers were major companies such
as the multinational, IBM.
[8] See Gay (1990), Banck (1986) and Diniz (1982) for descriptions of
the critical role neighborhood-based clientelism plays in Brazilian
politics.