"Participatory Responses to Oligarchic Democracy: Scaling Up and Scaling Down Participation in Latin America"

ANNUNZIATA, ROCÍO

La Haya

Workshop; Workshop "Constitutional Responses to the Crisis of Representation and Oligarchic Democracy"; 2017

International IDEA (Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance)

This paper aims at contributing to the assessment of the recent participatory experiences in Latin American from an anti-oligarchic perspective. At the same time, it aspires to analyze these participatory institutions within the discussion frame on the constraints of the local scale regarding citizen participation. While the prevailing view in participatory democracy theories and in participatory mechanisms research suggests that the local level is the most appropriate for citizen participation, I will argue on the contrary that a "scaling up" institutional design allows higher quality and more egalitarian participation. The most characteristic participatory institutions in Latin America are the so-called Participatory Budgeting, implemented by local governments in all the countries of the region. They usually have a territorialized design in which participants never come into contact with the problems and concerns of their fellow citizens from other neighborhoods. This design promotes fragmentation in many small projects and does not allow the development of redistributive strategies that improve the life conditions of the most disadvantaged in the cities. These design features add to the main limit for effective citizen participation: the very small budget they usually have to execute projects selected by citizens. Although they present themselves as tools for deepening democracy and inclusion, these important limitations lead to consider them as failed responses to oligarchic democracy.However, some other experiences of participatory institutions much less widespread and well known, such as the National Conferences of Brazil, have shown that the passage from local to state and then national level improves the quality and effectiveness of participation. This arrangement involves a pyramidal structure with a selection of delegates who act as citizen representatives at the higher level to produce definitions in the different areas of public policies (Health, Housing, Gender, etc.) in dialogue with governmental actors and experts. The design of the National Conferences could provide some clues on how to increase citizens´ power in participatory institutions by going beyond the local scale.First, this paper will illustrate the limits of citizen participation oriented to the small scale with the experiences of Participatory Budgeting in Argentina. Second, the National Conferences of Brazil will be described, highlighting the advantages of its institutional design. Finally, this paper will compare the "scaling up" and "scaling down" institutional designs for participation and consider the consequences of its constitutional inscription.