Content area
Full text
The rise of participatory democracy has often been explained by the renewal of collective action in Europe and Latin America. This review essay questions the 'movement-based' genesis of Brazilian participatory democracy by analyzing the idea of the state upon which it rests. It argues that the focus on social movements falls short of explaining the spread of participatory experiments, and that it rests on a simplified understanding of the dynamics of the Brazilian State prior to the 1980s. The argument is developed along three axes. First, the essay analyses how the 'classics' of Brazilian political sociology framed the early studies on participatory democracy. Second, it shows that even if the unifying notion of the state has been challenged, progress has focussed on the study of the democratic period. Third, it presents evidence that participation, as a practical category, was an integral part of the military regime's discourse and practice. Finally, the essay defines lines of investigation to reconsider the origins of participatory democracy in Brazil.
Keywords: Participatory democracy; Brazil; political sociology.
The genesis of participatory democracy in Brazil has often been explained in terms of the renewal of collective action in Europe and Latin America. This 'movement-based' interpretation of the genesis links social movements with the creation of new procedures based on the notion of citizen participation. It had, for example, been the interpretational framework applied to early participatory practices in France, such as the Municipal Action Groups (GAM) of the 1960s and 1970s. This was before it was challenged by scholars, who demonstrated the simultaneous changes taking place in public action (BLATRIX, 2000).
A similar process can be observed in Brazil. If civil society was the main protagonist of a first wave of analysis, the development of a broad field of studies on Brazilian experiments led to a more balanced view of the promoters of participatory democracy (DAGNINO, OLVERA and PANFICHI, 2006), including political elites and international organizations such as the World Bank (WAMPLER, 2008). Yet if the scope of the analysis has been broadened to obtain a better understanding of the changes generated by participatory institutions in democratic Brazil, the starting point is still related to the emergence of 'new actors', namely new social movements (WAMPLER, 2015) and the party historically associated...