Participatory Innovation and Representative Democracy in Latin America

ANDREW SEELE Y ENRIQUE PERUZZOTTI

Participatory Innovation and Representative Democracy in Latin America

The John Hopkins University Press

Lugar: Baltimore; Año: 2009; p. 1 - 16

After decades of political instability and constant experimentation with different forms of authoritarian and semi-democratic regimes, Latin American societies seemed to have reached a democratic plateau. Having experimented with different forms of regimes, democracy has become established as the only game in town. The experience of brutal forms of authoritarianism has contributed to creating an important commitment to democratic values in large sectors of the population. The building of democratic legitimacy, however, has not necessarily been followed by a parallel increase in democratic performance. Citizens are committed to democracy and value the hard-won gains of constitutional freedoms, yet they express growing dissatisfaction with the performance of democratic institutions and political leaders. The indicators of this worrying gap between citizens and the political process include electoral volatility, the emergence of outsider candidates, the popularity of anti–political establishment discourses, and low voter turnout. This dissatisfaction has opened a new wave of political experimentation aimed at institutional betterment. One important aspect of this experimentation has been the introduction of institutionalized mechanisms for civic participation. These include participatory budgeting, a variety of citizen’s councils, oversight boards, participatory planning, neighborhood committees, public audiences, and other institutions designed to provide citizens with a voice and greater participation in the decision-making process. In some cases, the numbers of these innovating experiences are impressive. Brazil, for instance, has over 170  examples of participatory budgeting and has thousands of health councils. Similarly, Mexico has had over a thousand reported cases of participatory planning in municipalities. In addition, Bolivia, Peru, and Guatemala have all adopted national legislation that mandates the inclusion of participatory institutions at the local level. In almost every country in Latin America, there have been significant experiences of local participatory innovation. By introducing new spaces of citizen engagement and new mechanisms of accountability, processes of participatory innovation aim to successfully address the institutional deficits of existing representative arrangements. The politics of participatory innovation seeks to address a central problem that is affecting the political dynamics of representative democracy in the region: the emergence of a growing gap between citizens and the political system. There has been a very lively debate about the reasons for such a troublesome gap and its consequences on the democratic process. Some authors have focused on the limitations of vertical mechanisms of accountability, that is, electoral and party systems. Radical policy switches and weakly embedded political parties translate into policies that fail to respond to voter’s mandates.  This has led some scholars to raise doubts about the usefulness of elections as mechanisms of accountability altogether.According to this view, there are intrinsic limitations that make elections poor mechanisms for translating citizens’ preferences into political outcomes. Meanwhile, other scholars have called attention to the inadequate functioning of institutions of horizontal accountability, especially courts and other oversight bodies that constrain the power of elected officials.In their view, the absence of effective controls on public officials deprives existing democracies of the safeguards that are crucial for the proper functioning of representative institutions. This absence in turn generates political regimes that bear limited resemblance to representative democracy.These arguments pinpoint important weaknesses of representative democracy in Latin America. The difficulties in enforcing the rule of law inevitably affect the quality of a democratic regime and deprive citizens of much-needed instruments of control over their representatives. Elections as well as party mediations are undoubtedly crucial elements of representative government and their defective functioning poses serious questions about how citizens’ preferences might actually influence the political process. It is imperative to strengthen both representative mediations as well as those agencies that oversee them to enhance the functioning of existing democratic regimes. Elections and parties, however, are not the only available channels of communications between representatives and citizens. A central goal of many of the innovative participatory mechanisms that are being introduced is to open up new venues of citizen participation to expand and increase the voice of citizens in the policymaking process beyond those traditionally established through electoral politics. A comprehensive account of representative government in the region needs to address the broad range of formal and informal linkages that citizens establish with their representatives. It is therefore imperative to analyze how newly developed arenas of exchange between citizens and the political system contribute to improve the nature of the representative bond as well as the tensions and problems they generate for democracy.