Participatory Innovation and Representative Democracy in Latin America

ANDREW SEELE Y ENRIQUE PERUZZOTTI

The John Hopkins University Press

Lugar: Baltimore; Año: 2009 p. 167

978-0-8018-9407-7

The basic assumption of this volume is that any politics of the institutional betterment of representative democracy must address the question of how to productively combine participation and representation, that is, how to develop productive forms of interaction between the represented and their representatives that could help to recreate a meaningful type of relationship between the citizenry and the political system between election cycles. Participation cannot be understood as the opposite of representation but must be seen as a crucial complement to it. As a result, the major goal of this volume is to analyze a variety of experiences of democratic innovation that have taken place in countries throughout the region and their relationship to representative democracy. The focus of this book is on the subnational level because it has been a breeding ground of these new forms of political experimentation. The last democratizing wave in Latin America has been followed by an important movement in institutional and political innovation that has sometimes been overlooked by a literature primarily focused on the workings of democracy at the national level. Regional, provincial, and municipal governments many times provided the testing ground for political reforms, establishing instances for participation and deliberation that are absent at higher levels scales of government.