Leonardo Avritzer

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Democracy, in the last one hundred years, became the standard form of organization of political rule within Western modernity. Still at the beginning of modernity, in the seventeenth century, Leibniz summarized the skepticism with democracy, which dominated the previous historical period, in the following sentence: "... today there is no prince so bad that it would not be better to live under him than in a democracy."(Dunn,1979:4). Leibniz remarks show a mood in relation to democracy as a form of organization of political life that rapidly changed in the following two hundred years. Already by the middle of the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville summarized the new mood - the one proper to modernity - in relation to democracy: "... a gradual development of the democratic principle must follow from the irresistible march of events. Daily some further privilege of the aristocracy comes under attack; it is a slow war waged about details, but infallibly in time it will bring the whole edifice down." (Tocqueville,1958:67-8). At that point, democracy was about to become the hegemonic form of organization of political rule in United States and in some parts of Europe. Yet, the whole world was still struggling on whether to adopt or not democratic forms of organization of their political life. In 1897, a Chinese Mandarin published an article in a Shanghai newspaper showing the growing influence of democracy outside the West. In this article he expressed the feeling on the inevitability of the expansion of democracy: "when the cycles of the world are about to move... it is not something restricted to West, not something that China can avoid. I know that in less than a hundred years all five continents will be under the rule of the people, and our China will not be able to continue unchanged."(Dunn,1979:11). Liang Ch’i Cha’o was right. At the end of the twentieth century democracy had become the hegemonic form of organization of political rule.

The feeling that democracy became an hegemonic form of political organization of political rule is quite widespread. Yet, a balance on what has been gained and what has been lost in this process it is yet to be done. In the one hundred years that separate Liang Ch’i Cha’o ‘s forecast on the hegemony of democracy from its realization several important changes occurred with the meaning and practice of democracy, among then, the sheer restriction of the concept of sovereignty, the consensus which emerged on the desirability of drawing on non-participatory forms of administration and the rejection of participatory political designs due to their non-institutional impact. All these new consensus are linked to the inter-war episodes in Europe and the consolidation of democracy in the European continent at the end of the so called "second wave of democratization".

Still at the end of the eighteenth century the democratic idea was associated with a strong conception of sovereignty. Jean Jacques Rousseau expressed well this association in a remark on the organization of the British parliament. For Rousseau, "sovereignty cannot be represented for the same reason why it cannot be alienated... the people deputies are not and could not be its representatives; they are merely its agents... Any law which the people has not ratified in person is void; is not a law at all. The English people believes itself to be free; it is graven mistaken; it is free only during the election of Members of Parliament..." (Rousseau,1968:141). Rousseau’s remarks on the exercise of sovereignty did not become the hegemonic conception of sovereignty within Western modernity. The main reason why Rousseau’s conception did not prevail was the emergence of complex forms of state administration which have led to the consolidation of specialized bureaucracies in most of the arenas inside the modern state. The modern individual loss his/her control over the political, the administrative, the military, the scientific, and many other spheres, as Max Weber observed already in the beginning of the twentieth century. In each of these activities the modern individual loss the control over means of producing material goods, political decisions, scientific knowledge and legal justice.

The reason why this process of "disapropriation" of the control of the individuals over his or her lives took place is the enormous expansion of the arenas on which decisions are made, on the issues that were made political (health, education, among others). According to the Weberian perspective, which is part of the hegemonic conception of democracy, a specialized bureaucracy is more prepared than the common individual to be in charge of these decisions. Complex decisions require the capacity of actors to have previous knowledge on the issues dealt and to pursue aims in a systematic way (Kronman,1983:131). For Weber, only a specialized bureaucracy can handle this dimension of the modern polity. This constituted the first source of the limitation in modern democracies of the concept of sovereignty.

There is a second source of restriction of the conception of sovereignty which is linked to the debates on rationality and mobilization which took place in the inter-war European scenario. Democratic theory emerged in association with the idea of the rationality of the homo politicus. Since the Enlightenment (Kant, 1781[1959]; Rousseau, 1968), the prevalence of rationality at the political level was associated with the rejection of illegitimate forms of government, a view based on the perception that rationality is the basis of individuals’ primary act of authorizing government.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, and particularly in the inter-war period, the link between democracy and rationality was undermined by what has been called "the emergence of particular interests." Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century democratic theory understood free public debate as an intrinsic part of the formation of the general will. Yet, it failed to perceive that the path which leads from Rousseau to Marx admits the entrance of particular interests into public debate, and thus to the triumph of particular interests and manipulation over rationality. Authors such as Ortega y Gasset, Karl Mannheim, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer argued against the possibility of rational participation in politics. For them, de-differentiation within the polity caused by the end of the insulation of elites (Ortega y Gasset, 1930; Kornhauser, 1959) as well as by the rise of forms of cultural domination at the private level (Horkheimer, 1947; Arendt, 1951), transformed the nature of politics at the beginning of the twentieth century. This diagnosis led to a critique of democracy according to which the preservation of values critical to democratic politics requires the insulation of those social groups which better embody such values (Kornhauser, 1959:22), meaning the insulation of the elites from the masses. The mass society argument breaks the association between democracy and political participation because it sees broader political participation leading not to the enlargement of actors and issues in the political sphere, but rather to the irrational pressure of the masses on the political system. The consequence of this argument is rule by elites, because it is the only guarantee that cultural values not shared by the masses will be preserved. The mass society criticism of popular sovereignty involved the effects of mass society on political institutions, in particular the risk that mass mobilization would bypass the institutions in charge of the formation of the general will. The preservation of the values of democracy was entrusted to the insulation of elites from the political pressure of the masses.

Weber’s remarks on the loss of sovereignty and mass society theorists remarks on the irrationality of mass participation in politics were integrated into a common framework for the understanding of democracy at the end of World War II, by Joseph Schumpeter, the author who proposed a reconstruction of democracy in Europe based on a restricted conception of popular sovereignty. Schumpeter took the transformations in democratic practice such as it has been conceived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as his point of departure. The central idea of the section of his magnum opus Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy devoted to the discussion of democracy is therefore the validity of the concept of popular sovereignty. Schumpeter picked up an issue already raised by Weber: how it is possible for the people to govern? His answer to this question is that if we understand sovereignty in a broad sense as the formation and determination of the general will, it is impossible for the people to govern. For Schumpeter, in order to make the concept of democracy useful it is necessary to separate it from the pursuit of a substantive notion of the common good, transforming it into a process for the choice of governing bodies: "Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political - legislative and administrative - decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself...." (Schumpeter,1942:242).

Reducing the scope of sovereignty allows Schumpeter to limit the role of the people to producing governments, that is to say, to choosing the particular group among the elites which seems most qualified to govern. Through this operation the people remains the ultimate arbiter of democratic politics in only one capacity, as the arbiter of competing elites. This reduction of the scope of the concept of sovereignty simultaneously implies a change in how the relationship between democracy and rationality is conceived. For Schumpeter, as political elites join a competitive system of representation, the access of the most qualified to positions of political leadership is guaranteed (Schumpeter,1942:280).

Democracy was consolidated in Europe in the aftermath of World War II through the application of a restricted conception of sovereignty. To be sure, the second wave of democratization, which covers the period between 1943 and 1962, was highly successful in regard to the implantation and consolidation of democracy within Europe, in a form very similar to the prescriptions of Schumpeter. In the most important cases of newly consolidated democracies in this period, particularly Germany, Italy, and Japan -countries which had broken with democratic practices as a consequence of the conflicts of the inter-war period - a restricted conception of sovereignty followed the reintroduction of democracy after 1945. On the other hand, if we look elsewhere we immediately perceive a different phenomenon: the attempt to extend democracy to Latin America, Asia, and Africa in the same period was a complete failure. By the mid-1970s, one-third of the world’s 32 previously active democracies had reverted to some form of authoritarianism. In1973, only two Latin America countries had democratically elected presidents.

An analysis of the sources of the breakdown of democracy in Latin America reveals two facts, each equally problematic for the theory of democratic elitism: either the most important democratic elitist assumptions, such as its analysis of mass society and the rationality of elites, were clearly contradicted, or they were at least unable to explain the so-called "second reverse wave of democratization." What seems to be at the root of the different failures of democracy in Latin America between 1964 and 1973 are the contradictions intrinsic to the model of inter-elite competition, a model which led to a broadened exercise of sovereignty by the elites themselves (Avritzer,2001). Thus, two characteristics of democratic elitist theory seem from the very beginning not to operate in Latin America.

First, the elites’ presumed adherence to democratic values, an ad hoc assumption derived from the conservative version of mass society theory (Kornhauser, 1959), was unable to explain the instability caused by inter-elite disputes in Latin American democracies. Elite attempts to reverse the results of democratic elections were responsible for the breakdown of democracy in Argentina in 1966, Brazil in 1964, and Chile in 1973, among other cases. Second, the role of mass mobilization in this period must also be re-addressed. Mass mobilizations sought in most cases to secure the rules of the game for inter-elite competition. No democratic breakdown in Latin America was coordinated with broad mass mobilizations. On the contrary, most of them were coordinated with some form of elite support triggered by the attempt to revert political elections ex-post. Thus, there seems to be two gaps in democratic elitism’s approach to democracy: first, its failure to reflect on the difference between democratic and non-democratic elites, a gap fulfilled in a very structural and problematic form in the work of by Almond and Verba at the end of this period ; and, second, its inability to understand mass mobilization. There are two different types of mass mobilization: a first type, studied in depth within the democratic elitist tradition, is an anti-institutional mobilization which can eventually disrupt the political process. A second type of mass mobilization, however, consists in forms of collective action within voluntary associations, social movements, and other fora of participation. In this latter case, collective action draws on pre-existing networks of association and is fully compatible with democratic life. Much of the political activity in Latin America fit into the second category and anticipated an approach developed later by social movements theorists to the possibility of democratic collective action (Tilly, 1986; Cohen, 1985). By assuming a priori a direct relationship between mass mobilization and democratic breakdown, democratic elitism missed the possibility of collective action in favor of the maintenance of democracy.

This paper will seek to challenge three assumptions of the hegemonic conception of democracy which will be called the democratic elitist conception. I will challenge, first of all, the widespread conception within the democratic elitist tradition, that in order to be consolidated democracy should restraint the forms of exercise of participation. The second element within the democratic elitist tradition which will be challenged is the idea that rational, hierarchical forms of administration can only be pursued by an insulated bureaucracy. The third element of the hegemonic conception of democracy which will be challenged in this paper, is that all forms of collective action are alike and there is a contradiction between mobilization and institutionalization. In opposition to it, it will be showed, for the case of Brazil, that most forms of collective action are democratic and that they are able to produce a new institutional designs which are participatory and incorporate new cultural elements into the polity. I will discuss the three elements referring to one case of participatory democracy in Brazil, the case of the participatory budgeting process.

Democratization in Brazil and the Emergence of Innovation at the Societal Level

Brazil’s political system throughout the twentieth century has been highly unstable due to inter-elite political disputes. Between 1930 and 1945, the dominant political system was corporatist authoritarianism. In its first phase, this regime seek to introduce regular elections. Yet, after 1937, the conflict between agrarian and modernizing elites led to a move from democratic to authoritarian corporatism, with the suspension of both elections and individual liberties. Between 1945 and 1964, the dominant regime was an unstable form of democratic populism, where all presidential mandates were subject to some kind of anti-democratic challenge. Vargas (1950-1954) faced a rebellion and did not complete his mandate; Kubitcheck (1956-1960) needed the support of the army to seize office; and Janio Quadros renounced the presidency after the failure of an anti-congressional coup he had sponsored. Finally, João Goulart (1960-1964) was overthrown by a military coup. Between 1964 and 1985 the country suffered its worst authoritarian experience. Congress was closed twice by the regime, once in 1968 and again in 1977. Elections for president were suspended and after 1968 most individual guarantees, such as habeas corpus, were lost as well. Thus, the Brazilian political process shows, first of all, in contrast with the assumption of the hegemonic conception of democracy, that elites are not necessarily the guarantors of democratic political values. In the Brazilian case, most of the anti-democratic attempts between the 30 and the 80’s involved inter-elite conflicts on different conceptions on the role of the state.

Redemocratization in Brazil took place through a restricted pact between the opposition party, the PMDB, and a faction within the party which had supported the regime, the PDS in 1985. A new constitution has been in place since 1988 and regular presidential elections have occurred since 1989.

Throughout the twentieth century, Brazilian elites had one political project: modernization. The country’s elites led a modernizing project which transformed a predominantly rural country into the world’s tenth largest industrialized nation. The share of the population working in the industrial sector increased from 10.4% in 1940 to 24.3% in 1980, while that working in agriculture and minerals decreased from 65.8% to 29.9% (Santos, 1987:137). Far from being simply a success story of economic modernization, this process has demonstrated its social drawbacks: throughout the twentieth century Brazil became one of the world most unequal countries. In 1984, the last year of authoritarianism in Brazil, more than 35% of Brazilians were poor or very poor; in the northeast, this was true for more than half the population. Brazil’s economic modernization created sharp political and economic inequalities at the local level. The largest Brazilian cities grew at an unbelievable rate between 1950 and 1980: the population of São Paulo increased from 2.198 million to 8.493 million; Belo Horizonte grew from 352,000 to 1.780 million; and Porto Alegre, from 394,000 to 1.125 million (Ibge, 1983). The increase of the urban population and the creation and expansion of rationalized public administration was not followed by a proportional increase in urban services. On the contrary, most of the services required by an urban population were very poorly provided in the 1980s in Brazil. In 1984, only 80.2% of city-dwellers in the southeast - Brazil’s wealthiest region - and only 59.6% in the south had access to treated water. Access to sewage was even lower: only 55% of the urban population in the southeast and 11.8% in the south had access to it in 1984 (Santos, 1987:161-2). Thus, Brazil’s process of modernization, which implied in the creation of a specialized bureaucracy according to the Weberian prescriptions, could not through this process, handle its most pressing social needs.

Two factors might explain the low level of public infrastructure and services in most Brazilian cities in this period: the limited organization of the urban population and the country’s strong tradition of clientelism. The level of organization of the Brazilian population was traditionally very low. Some Brazilian cities had some very limited forms of neighborhood associations during the democratic populist period (1946-1964): only 124 neighborhood associations were created in Rio de Janeiro during the whole period (Boschi, 1987), and only 71 were created in Belo Horizonte between the 1920s and the 1970s (Avritzer, 2000). Thus, in general it is possible to state that the Brazilian population was relatively unorganized when the democratic regime collapsed in 1964. In addition, state violence prevented organization throughout the authoritarian period. Afonso and Azevedo (1988) found fear to be the main reason the urban poor did not resist urban relocation in Belo Horizonte in the early seventies; Gay (1994) found the same of the Vidigal population in Rio de Janeiro during this period.

The second reason for poor provision of urban services is the reliance on clientelism, the main political tradition at the local level in Brazil (Nunes Leal, 1946; Cammack, 1991; Mainwaring, 1990; Avritzer, 1998). Brazilian political life, since the nineteenth century, has been marked by the presence of political mediators in charge of delivering public goods (Graham, 1990). Only in the late seventies, as part of the reaction against authoritarianism and the break between church and state, did this process begin to change with the formation of independent neighborhood associations. Neighborhood associations blossomed as part of a general associative movement in reaction to authoritarianism. In Rio de Janeiro, 166 neighborhood associations were formed between 1979 and 1981 (Boschi, 1987). In Belo Horizonte, 80% of the existing neighborhood associations date from after 1980. In all cases these associations were an expression of a change in patterns of association. They claimed organizational autonomy from the state; they challenged the presence of political mediators; and they challenged the tradition of considering urban services as a favor to be delivered by the state (Avritzer, 2000).Thus, an analysis on the Brazilian process of societal re-organization shows a second important departure from the hegemonic conception of democracy. New forms of collective action emerged during the Brazilian process of democratization. At the urban level, neighborhood associations emerged, challenged the available culture of political mediators and introduced new cultural elements such as democratic forms of organization at the local level and a culture of claims( instead of favor) in relation to the state. Hence, cultural innovation introduced by social actors, an element not tackled by the hegemonic conception of democracy, was a central aspect of the Brazilian process of democratization.

Social innovation and the emergence of Participatory Budgeting

Brazilian redemocratization involved simultaneously large doses of political continuity mixed with some doses of social innovation. At the political level, in spite of some seeds of social organization, the hegemonic forces of the modernization process retained control of the political system. The first civilian president, José Sarney (1985-1990), had led the party which supported the authoritarian regime during its final period. Within the constituent assembly, there were more MPs who had belonged to the authoritarian regime’s party (Arena) than to the opposition (PMDB) (Rodrigues, 1987). There was continuity not only of political actors but also of their policies. One of the most important institutional leftovers of authoritarianism was the clientelist system built in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and strengthened by the authoritarian regime. Clientelism increased after 1986 through the creation of what can be called a "patrimonial budget." The Ministry of Planing - the institution in charge of the elaboration of the federal budget - was transformed into a mechanism for organizing patrimonial exchanges. Every year when Congress votes on the federal budget, MPs present amendments involving public works in the regions where their electorate is concentrated. The total amount of the patrimonial budget - the portion of the budget to be allocated on local public works - is, however, preset by the federal government, resulting in a tendency to divide the resources. Thus, two elements of authoritarian Brazil continue to show their presence in democratic Brazil: the lack of prerogatives of a disempowered Congress which votes legislation on a non-political basis. Second, clientelism which is still strong and constitutes the dominant currency inside the Brazilian Congress disempowering local forms of organization and leading to widespread administrative inefficiency.

However, the Brazilian democratization process was not informed solely by processes of political continuity. Inside the Constituent Assembly, proposals for the empowerment of social actors showed their strength. Article 14 of the new Constitution guaranteed "popular initiative" in the process of exercise of peoples’ sovereignty. Article 29 on the organization of the cities required "the cooperation of representative associations in the process of city planning". Thus, the Constituent Assembly due to the process of presentation of popular amendment also incorporated the new cultural drive proper to Brazil in the eighties. The acknowledgement of the importance voluntary associations and that they should be incorporated in the process of decision-making in the cases of city planning as well as in the decision-making process on social policies was one of the long-term legacies of the Constituent process. It led to new forms of organization at the local level such as councils with the participation of social actors in the areas of health care, education, social assistance and the environment (Raichellis, 1999; Tabagiba, 2000). Yet, participatory budgeting does not have an exclusive institutional origin. On the contrary, it is a proposal made by neighborhood associations and incorporated by a left wing party which, then, led to the creation of a new form of participatory institution.

The idea of participatory budgeting emerged for the first time in the response of neighborhood associations in the city of Porto Alegre - the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, a 1,3 million inhabitant city - to a proposal of participation made by the Alceu Collares’s administration in March 1986. Collares, the first democratically elected mayor of the city after the authoritarian period, belonged to a populist party (P.D.T.) and proposed the participation of the population in his administration through neighborhood monitors (Baierle,1998). In a meeting in March 1986, UAMPA, the umbrella organization for neighborhood associations made a counter proposal which contained the first elements of the idea of participatory budgeting: " the most important element in city politics is the definition on where the resources will be applied. That is the reason why neighborhood associations should seek to directly influence in the elaboration of the city budget..."(Uampa,1986). The document also stated that "...UAMPA’s aim should be to find out the investment priorities of each neighborhood, region and the city in general." This is the first available document in which the concept of the centrality of the budget in the democratization of local politics emerges.

The Workers Party (P.T.) won the elections for mayor in Porto Alegre in 1988. The P.T. was part of the movement for the organizational autonomy of labor from the state and, at the same time, advocated an idea of participatory democracy more inspired by the Marxian conception of labor councils than by the trajectory of social movements in Brazil. Its program was a defense of local councils, which would generate city councils and furnish a worker-based form of parallel administration (Abers, 1996:38). The party had its first important victories in the local elections of 1988, when it elected the mayors of São Paulo and Porto Alegre among other cities; in some cases, like that of São Paulo, it decided to practice something very similar to its workers councils proposal. Even in Porto Alegre, the conception which prevailed during the first year of Workers Party administration was deeply influenced by the idea that politics always involves the representation of particular interests and that the Workers Party should only change which particular interests prevailed within the local administration (Utzig, 1996:211). Thus, the Workers Party did not have at that point in its program the idea of participatory budgeting, but only a general idea of participatory government.

The political decisions on participatory budgeting were taken in an overlapping way during the first two years of Workers Party rule in Porto Alegre. From its inauguration, the Olívio Dutra administration tried to increase participation at large. In the first year, most of the secretaries introduced some participatory elements in their health, education, and planning proposals. At the same time, in its first thirty days the Olívio Dutra administration took the crucial decision of making the CRC - Coordination of Relations with the Community - responsible for centralizing all of the community’s claims. The CRC thus became central to the PB process. Although it had existed prior to 1989 (Lima, 1999), the CRC’s role had been to provide city associations with tax exemption certificates (atestado de utilidade pública). Thus, four steps toward participatory budgeting overlapped in the beginning of the Dutra administration: the concern of urban social movements with budgetary control and with direct participation at the local level; the emphasis the Workers Party placed on participation and councils; the decentralized initiative of several secretaries, including the planning secretary, to encourage popular participation; and the idea, which emerged in the first thirty days, to centralize participation in the CRC.

The process of creation of participatory budgeting, as a participatory form of decision-making on the budget, is linked to the action of multiple actors and its overlapping with two factors: the availability of new cultural elements at the neighborhood level, an availability linked to the formation and development of neighborhood movements in the city of Porto Alegre. It was not by chance that these movements were able to identify for the first time, the budget issue as a contentious issue. Second, the fact that civil society in Brazil was able to recover the idea of social actors claim for citizenship and to incorporate this idea within the Constituent Assembly in the form of hybrid institutions with social actors participation. Thus, it is important to point out that the Brazilian process of democratization and emergence of participatory budgeting are processes which contradict important elements of the hegemonic conception of democracy: first of all, the political forms which are characteristic of democratic elitist conception and which resemble the institutions created in Europe during the second wave of democratization show, in the Brazilian case, surprising continuities with the practices which were dominant during the authoritarian period. They were taken over by clientelism, the were unable to produce administrative efficiency and last but not least they are unable produce democratic legitimacy. Secondly, the forms of collective action which emerged during the democratization process, in spite an initial anti-institutional stand, found institutionalization in the popular amendments for the Constituent Assembly, in articles 14, 29, 204 and 227 of the Constituent Charter, in the organic laws of several cities, among them Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte. Third, the format of the new Brazilian democracy was not simply the reproduction of format produced by the second wave of democratization. There were innovations which were proper to the cultural debates of the democratization process and which produced new institutions in which participation was broadened rather than restricted. Allow me to describe the participatory budgeting process in order to show how it innovates vis-a-vis the form of the institutions proper to the hegemonic conception of democracy.

Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a local participatory policy which responds to the plight of the poor in major Brazilian cities. It includes social actors, neighborhood association members, and common citizens in a process of negotiation and deliberation which takes place in two stages: a participatory stage, in which participation is direct, and a representative stage, in which participation takes place through the election of delegates and/or councilors. Due to the differences between the process, allow me to describe its functioning in two different cities, Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte.

The PB in Porto Alegre. The PB in Porto Alegre involves two rounds of regional assemblies, one round of intermediary meetings, and the operation of a councilors’ body called the PB council year-round. The process begins every year in April when the first round of district assemblies takes place. In this first stage, the population attends an assembly in each of the regions. Every first-round regional assembly is attended by the mayor and a short account settling process begins with a description of the administrative implementation of the decisions taken in the previous year. The floor is open for about an hour, during which citizens express themselves about what has been taking place, about possible disagreement with the administration, and about what should be done in the region in the coming year. Participation in these meetings is crucial because they constitute the basis for participating in the remaining parts of the process. Participation in these meetings is individual but individuals throughout the registration process are required to demonstrate membership in voluntary associations. In 1999, about two-thirds of participants were involved in regional associations. Delegates are elected at the end of the first round of regional assemblies based on two criteria: the first is the total number of people attending the assembly. The formula to determine the total number of delegates in Porto Alegre is as follows: for "up to 100 people attending - 1 delegate for every 10 people, from 101 to 250 - 1 for every 20, from 251 to 400, 1 for 30, from 401 on 1 for 40" (Poa, 1999 a:6). For instance, in 1999 the first round regional assemblies in the center of Porto Alegre was attended by 520 people; thus, the region will have 26 delegates (10 for the first 100, 8 for the next 150 people, 5 for the next 150, and 03 for the remaining 126 people who attended the meeting).

The second stage of the PB is the so-called intermediary meetings. They have two responsibilities: ranking thematic priorities and deliberating about which public works the region will claim. Ranking is a process through which five out of twelve types of public goods (pavement, sewerage, legalization of urban property, organization of the city, housing, education, health and social assistance, transportation and circulation, leisure, sports, economic development and culture) are selected as priorities. It involves two processes carried out earlier by the public administration: the evaluation of the population’s previous access to public goods and the classification of each of the city’s regions according to its population. Thus, two criteria are used in ranking: the first is previous access (and therefore present need). A table for classifying priorities assigns grades in inverse relation to previous access to a particular public good. According to the 1999 criteria, up to 80% previous access to a public good leads to grade 1, up to 60% previous access, grade 2, and up to 20%, grade 5. The second criterion is the population of the region and the third the community’s own ranking of its priorities, again on a scale of 5 to 1. At the end of this process, a region can reach up to 15 points if it previously had less than 20% access to a public good, chooses this good as a top priority, and has more than 120,000 inhabitants.

In the second round of regional assemblies, the region elects delegates to the PB council. This process, which takes place in June, leads to the formation of a council composed as follows: two councilors from each of the 16 regions (32), two from each of the five thematic assemblies (10), one from the Uampa - the umbrella organization of neighborhood communities - and one from the public service trade union (2). The PB council thus has 44 members.

Thematic meetings. The second Workers Party administration (1993-1996) introduced so-called "thematic oriented meetings." They grew out of a process called "constituent city," which aimed to incorporate social sectors who still stood outside of the process into the PB (Navarro, 1998). The result was the introduction of five thematic assemblies on the following issues: city organization and development, health and social assistance, economic development and tax systems, transport and circulation and education, and culture and leisure (ibid). The cycle of the thematic meetings is parallel to that of regional meetings, and they are entitled to elect ten delegates to the PB council.

The PB council: The PB council is inaugurated each July. It creates a budget proposal based on the rankings and decisions which took place in the intermediary meetings. The P.B. council then revises the final budget proposal elaborated by the Gaplan and mayor’s cabinet. In September, a final budget proposal is in place. The council also monitors the implementation of its decisions by the city’s administrative agencies during the year.

The PB in Belo Horizonte.

The PB has been in practice in Belo Horizonte since 1993. It involves a process of regional assemblies leading to definition of investment priorities in a similar fashion to the Porto Alegre’s process. Budget decisions take place in the so called "regional forum of priorities".

The first round of regional assemblies is similar to its counterpart in Porto Alegre, although it is more argumentative and less deliberative. The administration opens each assembly with a statement on what was decided in the previous year and the current state of implementing previous decisions. Still, in the first round of regional assemblies, the administration points out the resources available for public works in the areas of pavement, sewage, and housing. The decision-making process is also different from that used in Porto Alegre. The administration announces the resources available for each region using a formula which assigns resources in direct proportion to population and inverse proportion to average income:

PVR= popR

e 1/Y^*

50% of the PB’s resources are evenly divided among the regions and 50% are allocated according to this formula. Also in the second round, the main proposals for public works in each sub-region (Belo Horizonte has 37 sub-regions) are presented, initiating a process of negotiation among the communities.

The second round of regional assemblies involves the election of delegates who will vote on the public works to be included in the city budget. Delegates were elected in 1998 according to the following criteria: from 1 to 200 participants, one delegate for every 10 people attending the assembly; from 201 to 410 participants, one for every 15; above 410, one for every 20. In addition, each region is entitled to one delegate per legally constituted voluntary association within its boundaries (BH, 1999). Once the delegates are elected for the forum on regional priorities, negotiation begins.

Priorities caravans: "Priorities caravans" are a stage within the region in which members of the sub-regions negotiate their different proposals among themselves. Each community which has proposed a public work to be included in the city budget visits other communities in order to evaluate their level of need. At the same time, different communities start to support one another’s claims, forming coalitions which will be decisive in the deliberative process.

The forum of regional priorities: At this stage, the delegates from each sub-region, having already visited other sub-regions, negotiate on the final format of the budget. Unlike in Porto Alegre, the final decision in Belo Horizonte takes place through the formation of tickets with coalitions of proposals from different sub-regions. Also unlike Porto Alegre, the decisions of the regional fora are final. The public works approved by the delegates will be integrated into the budget proposal. 20% of the delegates present at the regional fora become members of the Comforças, a monitoring body which follows the process of bidding for public works and can negotiate substitutions in case of technical problems.

One element of the P.B. in its relation to the democratization discussion should be singled out: the fact that the regional assemblies, the common element of the P.B. in Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte, draw on pre-existing practices introduced by neighborhood movements in the 70’s and the 80’s. Community actors know how the process of organization at the local level works. They also have a long practice of discussing which are the needs of their communities. In this sense, if the P.B. is institutional invention, it is also institutional invention based on known practices. It should also be singled out that that new forms of collective action which emerged at the local level during the democratization process in Brazil found a form of institutionalization in a design for public participation. Thus, the P.B. shows that the broadened forms of participation which are characteristic of the Brazilian process of democratization did not vanish away as many authors (Stepan, 1988; Azevedo and Prates, 1991; Santos, 1993) have argued. On the contrary, these new practices generated forms of participatory democracy that as I will show in the rest of this paper produces more legitimacy, more administrative efficiency and deal in a better way with the complexity issue.

The P.B. and the amplification of sovereignty at the local level

Participatory budgeting connects in a singular way the amplification of participation and the establishment of criteria of justice. Participation in the P.B. in Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte takes place, mainly, at the regional level in the local or intermediary assemblies. An evaluation of the participatory characteristics of the PB shows both in Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre that participation is directly linked to the credibility of the process and the existence of public rules for action. Participation in the PB plays the role of assuring a form of deliberation which is public and makes available information on the access to public goods. Table 1 below shows the levels of participation in Porto Alegre:

Some characteristics of participation in the PB should be stressed. First of all, initial participation in Porto Alegre’s PB was low; in the first year, it was low in most regions and very low in those without any previous tradition of social organization, such as Restinga, Glória, Ilhas and Humaitá (where only 36, 20, 80, 10 people respectively participated in the second round of regional assemblies). The low level of participation in almost all regions was probably linked to doubts about the capacity of the process to deliver public goods. Beginning in the second year, however, there was a huge change in the pattern of participation. On the one hand, the effectiveness of the first year’s deliberations was a strong incentive in those regions which already had a tradition of community organization such as the Leste (east region), where 705 attended the second regional assembly, or Parthenon, where 264 people attended the second regional assembly. On the other hand, participation remained very low in regions without a tradition of participation or community organization. These regions, which are among the poorest, had low levels of political participation for some years. Thus, again we can note the importance of pre-existing practices at the societal level pre-determining the effectivity of the process. In the first years of the P.B. in Porto Alegre, the feasibility of a form of broadened participation depended on those actors who already shared a tradition of local assemblies at the regional level. It is only after such a tradition became an acknowledged form of claiming public goods that it generalized itself to the city as a whole.

A second element worth noting is how participation is directly linked to deliberation. If we look into the pattern of participation during the first five years, participation in the second regional assembly was larger than in the first (in 1992, for instance, 1,442 people participated in the first round of regional assemblies and 6,168 in the second round). Throughout this period, the deliberative moment was the second round of regional assemblies in which the election of the councilors took place. Beginning in 1996, delegates were elected in the first round of regional assemblies, making them more deliberative. From this moment on, attendance in the first round became higher than in the second (in 1996, 6,855 people attended the first round of regional assemblies and 4,966 people attended the second round). This tendency of greater participation in the first round persists to this day showing the capacity of the population to identify the deliberative moment and to participate in a rational way.

The most important aspect of the participatory process in Porto Alegre is the continuous increase in participation in spite of the fact that the fora of participation have changed. Participation increased from year to year with very few exceptions (1994 and 1996). The continuous increase in participation can be attributed to the confidence that the deliberative process would continue due to the political hegemony of the Workers Party in the city. In this sense, the pattern of participation in Porto Alegre can be contrasted with that in Belo Horizonte, where city politics has been more contentious. Table 2 shows the variations in participation in Belo Horizonte:

Participation in Belo Horizonte shows more variation due to stronger doubts about the continuation of the process. In the first year, participation in Belo Horizonte was already high due to the demonstration effect of the Porto Alegre experience - the population had good reason to assume that it was participating in an effective process. Participation increased still more once the effectiveness of the process at the city level became clear. In its second year of the PB, participation grew more than 50% over the previous year, but then decreased in 1996 with the emergence of doubts regarding the PB’s future. In that year’s city elections, there were serious doubts that the Workers Party candidate would win and, thus, that the PB’s decisions would be implemented. Participation decreased again in 1997 because, despite the fact that the new, non-Workers Party administration promised to continue the PB process, social actors doubted that it would implement the decisions. However, once it become clear that it would respect the deliberations, participation grew again. Thus, one can argue that participation in the PB varies according to two factors: previous traditions of association and the perceived effectiveness of the process. Thus, participation shows rational characteristics, particularly in relation to social actors willingness to participate in collective and public forms of deliberation.

A second important element to be discussed is that both in Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre the participatory process is connected to the existence of criteria of justice. In the case of Porto Alegre, the criteria of justice is determined by the table of previous access to public goods which has to be made compatible with the participatory process. In the case of Belo Horizonte, the criteria of justice is determined by the formula which distributes resources to the regions (see page 19). In Porto Alegre, in each of the twelve areas in which decisions are going to be taken in the intermediary meetings, a table of previous access to public goods by the population of the city divided in different regions pre-determines the deliberative process. Table 3 below, for the area of pavement in Porto Alegre shows how this process works:

Table 3 allows us to see why the participatory process involved in the P.B. does not become a particularistic process, as some of the literature on democratic theory argues (Arendt, 1959; Schumpeter,1942; Sartori,1987 ). Participation in the P.B. is connected with the establishment of rules for the access to public goods. In the case of Porto Alegre, the 16 regions of the city are differentiated according to previous access to the good in question. In some regions, such as the Center region in Porto Alegre, previous access to pavement has led to the paving of more than 99% of the streets. In other regions of Porto Alegre, such as Extremo-Sul or Lomba do Pinheiro almost 80% or 55% of the streets, respectively, are not paved. In contrast to the forms of decision-making by a bureaucracy pressed by particular interests, the P.B. incorporates criteria of justice in the deliberative process. The way it incorporates criteria of justice is through a combination of three criteria in the decision-making process: previous access to a public good, population of the region and deliberation by the population in the intermediary assemblies. In each of this criterion, a region is evaluated and is given a note from 1 to 5. Thus, a region that has 80% of need of one public good, whose population is more than 120.000 and which chose that public good is capable of making the total amount of points, 15. One the other hand, a region which already has this good or a region with a small population is not going to make as many points according to the same criterion.

Participatory budgeting is, thus, capable of integrating forms of broadening popular sovereignty with forms of dealing with issues of justice. This combination, again, poses problems for the hegemonic conception of democracy. The hegemonic conception of democracy works with narrow and individualistic conception of interest representation which is used to justify the reduction of the scope of sovereignty. According to authors such as Schumpeter (1942), Downs (1957), Elster (1988) among others, the problems with forms of broadened participation is that they are supposed to operate in individualistic settings in which it is very difficult to define the common good. As an alternative to such an attempt, the hegemonic conception of democracy proposes decentralized forms of interest representation within a competitive offer in which it is up to the electorate to chose which will be the dominant articulation of interests. Though, the literature in general argues from the enhancement of particular interests through this form of representation (Lowi, 1969) it does not point out participatory democracy as an alternative.

The case of the P.B. is very instructive to see how broadened forms of sovereignty might be able to shed new light on this problem. The P.B. in spite of being a broadened form of sovereignty does not leave to the participatory institutions the whole decision-making process on the allocation of public goods. It introduces rules, as a device, which pre-determines the decision-making process. By doing this, it innovates in terms of democratic practices in two ways: first of all, by pre-setting limits for particularism, limits that have been historically lacking both in the practice of representative and participatory democracy, it changes the terms of the democratic debate. Second, interest which are considered legitimate in the P.B. process are required to be justified, and, have to overlap with the two criteria of justice above outlined. Thus, the system of connection between participation and rules by the P.B. re-actualize the role of broadened forms of participation within democratic theory. It shows that the Weberian solution to higher levels of participation which forecasts an increase in bureaucratic control is not the only possible solution. Another possible might be available: a solution according to which "in internally differentiated societies, the stronger the bond between democracy and distributive justice, the more complex the methodology which guarantees such bonds..."(Santos,1998:484). In this sense, the P.B. represent a new form of making participation and institutionalization compatible, a way in which democratic practices and social complexity which are the result of new forms of collective action within a differentiated society are connected with rules for participatory decision-making which offset the enhancement of the power of the administrative personnel.

Participation, Complexity and Monitoring in the P.B.

A second are in which the P.B. innovates is the area of control by the population of the implementation of the deliberations on city investments. The P.B. has produced very significative results in terms of the control of the administrative personnel through broaden forms of monitoring.

The PB uses two different forms of monitoring. In Porto Alegre, the P.B. council is responsible for monitoring budget implementation. This is accomplished through the tension between two administrative arenas - Gaplan and CRC - and the PB council. Thus, administrative officials are in charge of implementation, but their access to decision-making is not exclusive; they are required to explain choices to a body of representative delegates. In Belo Horizonte, there is a special monitoring body, Comforças. According to Faria (1996), the aims of the Comforças are: 1) to check and supervise the schedule of implementation the budget (timetable, expenses, and accountability); 2) to supervise substitutions or re-dimensioning in cases where choices made by the community face technical opposition ; 3) to present the community’s point of view before a technical decision is made; 4) to demand explanations on controversial issues in the implementation of the PB; 5) to organize meetings with the community to explain the administration’s point of view on certain issues; 6) to appoint two representatives to the bidding of PB public works; 7) to participate in the organization of the regional forum; and 8) to investigate abuses of power and the appearance of special interests in the deliberative process (Faria, 1996:103-104). Thus, the P.B. incorporates the forms of autonomous organization of the population in order to establish a system of monitoring at the local level, which allows the population to control the internal operation of the administration. In this way, the connection decisions taken by the popular assemblies and the way these decision are being translated into administrative orders is controlled by the population.

The P.B. also introduces a new conception of administrative accountability by transforming monitoring in a permanent feature of its administrative process. Forms of monitoring instituted by the P.B. council in Porto Alegre or by the Comforças em Belo Horizonte represent the integration of structures of participation at the local level with the administrative level. The P.B anticipates in its administrative practice the lack of responsiveness of the administration to population demands by creating a permanent and institutional presence of the population in monitoring bodies. This reduces the level of irregularities in public bidding - an endemic problem in Brazil - and at the same time forces the technical members of the administration to adapt themselves to the participation of the population in technical questions.

The monitoring institutions introduced by the P.B. show how deliberation can be separated from implementation without giving technicians exclusive access to administrative arenas, a feature of the hegemonic conception of democracy presented above. The PB instituted a public body in charge of presenting and representing the community’s point of view within the administration. This solution overcomes the disadvantages of elitist designs by giving a more democratic, less particularistic solution to the link between technical knowledge and exclusive access within administrative arenas. Monitoring bodies generate groups of active participants who acquire a greater understanding of technical issues. These groups can convey technical details to the general population and also debate technical issues with administrative bodies. In seven years of PB in Belo Horizonte, 1428 people participated in the PB monitoring bodies. Asked if participating in Conforças led them to understand better the problems of their sub-regions, 88.5% of Conforças members in the center-south of the city and 76.9% in the Barreiros region answered positively (Faria, 1996:126). Thus, an attractive aspect of monitoring institutions is that they differentiate between deliberation and implementation, yet at the same time respond better to technical considerations by making technical bodies more accountable.

The experience of monitoring bodies also suggests that administrative decision-making under the constraint of participatory bodies is more efficient. In an interview with the president of Sudecap, the state company in charge of public works in Belo Horizonte, he acknowledged that the presence of monitoring bodies with the ability to pose questions regarding timetables and implementation details, increased both accountability and efficiency within the company. The more the population knows about technical details, the less usual explanations for inefficiency and delays are accepted.

The operation of monitoring bodies challenge a second aspect of the hegemonic conception of democracy, namely, that the central aspect of complex decisions is the specialized knowledge on the issues involved and the capacity of a specialized body to deal with such issues in a routinized way (Weber, 1919). The P.B. challenges the universal application of these rules in two different ways: first of all, it shows that the role of technicians in decision-making bodies should not lead to the exclusive prerogative to make decisions (Melucci and Avritzer,2000). Access of the population to decision-making bodies in the Brazilian case, reduces corruption in bidding processes and also applies pressure to the implementation process, as the Belo Horizonte case shows well. Secondly, the P.B. also shows that the problem of knowledge can be also tackled in a more democratic form. Though, in the cases of Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte the population knew very little about the city administrative process, at the end of a one or two years period in a monitoring body this knowledge is enhanced. This shows that the possibility of transferring complex knowledge from technicians to bodies of representatives of the population is not a closed path, such as the hegemonic conception of democracy has argued. In addition to that, the presence of a monitoring body makes easier to address conflictual issues between technicians and the population. Thus, the P.B. opens space for the defense of an intermediary conception between the Weberian position on the exclusive access of technicians to decision-making bodies and the participatory conceptions of democracy feeling that participation at the administrative level should be enhanced. It proposes an intermediary position in which a sphere of control of administrative decision-making and a process of tension between technicians and monitoring bodies leads to control of process previously considered off-bounds. In this case, extension of sovereignty is made compatible with rational administration.

Social innovation and counter-hegemonic forms of participatory democracy

The example of the P.B. in Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte points in the direction that the institutional forms of democracy are not fixed and that new experiences are needed in order to tackle specific issues. It also shows that the issues with which democracy is concerned change, from one setting to another. In the Brazilian case, clientelism, disempowerment of the population and unequal distribution of public goods at the local level have been some of the issues that the fixed form of the democracy generated by the second wave of democratization could not solve. The elitist conception of democracy that evaluate the success or failure of democracy according to elite practices (O’Donnell, 1996; 1998), are all pessimistic about the future of Brazilian. In the Brazilian case, as it has been showed above, old practices have only led to clientelism, administrative inefficiency and intra-elite rivalry.

Yet, there is a second way of evaluating democracy, a way that requires that we depart from the hegemonic conception of democracy above outlined, an evaluation based on the emergence of new societal practices. The P.B. in the cases of Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte point in the direction of virtue of broadened forms of sovereignty at the local level. It shows that some of the drawbacks of recent democracies are based on their inability to incorporate social innovation. In the case of the P.B. innovation understood as a societal practice of negotiating openly the access to public goods becomes incorporated in a deliberative design. Such a design, substitute elites practices and their drawbacks for broadened forms of discussion and decision-making. In addition to that, the P.B. gives a different answer to the issue of justice and particularism. Instead of being seduced by the siren song on the inevitability of particularism, the P.B. introduces rules for their limitation. And, last but not least, the P.B. also provides a different answer to the issue of access of technicians to decision-making bodies, a problem not yet solved by the hegemonic conception of democracy.

The different answers provided by the P.B. to the three above enumerated issues all point in one direction, namely, that the contradiction between collective action, broadened forms of political participation and de-institutionalization in the way that it has been assumed by the hegemonic theory of democracy based on the European experience in the inter-war period cannot be generalized. Democracy in the third wave countries has not been threatened by undifferentiated forms of political mobilization as it has been in Europe during the inter-war period. The central problem faced by democracy in these countries is a narrow stock of democratic practices. Thus, in these cases, institutionalization ceases to be the opposite of mobilization which also changes its form to collective action at the public level. Institutionalization in such a condition has to assume a different meaning, namely the connection between new societal practices with new institutional designs. The P.B. as a broadened form of political participation show precisely this fact.

Liang Ch’i Cha’o and Alexis de Tocqueville were both right when the pointed out the inevitability of democracy as an hegemonic form of political rule. Yet, they did not perceive that the forms of democracy outside the West are not fixed and do not necessarily resemble those forms that became hegemonic. A difference seems to be central between the Western and the non-Western forms of democracy: the availability of a stock of democratic practices and the role of social actors in the process of broadening this stock through the integration of different experiences(Santos,2000). The Brazilian case, which has been approached in this paper, is a good example of limited stock of democratic practices on the part of elites, a drawback only recently offset by emergence of new societal practices. Thus, the fact that both Tocqueville and Liang Ch’i Cha’o were right, should not lead us to think that in the extension of the democratic tide the same cultural forms dominant in the West will prevail. In the case of Brazil, the integration of the country in a democratic tide has been slow, contradictory and involving moves in opposite directions. As a matter of fact, Liang Ch’i Cha’o definition of the democratic expansion as a cycle or Tocqueville image of a democratic tide both ignore the fact that those who are loosing a new privilege every day might adhere to democratic values in an incomplete way. In contrast to that, the Brazilian experience shows that the democratic tide might be connected to stocks of practices of those who are not linked to loss privileges but on the contrary should have something to gain from the expansion of democracy. These are the social actors whose innovations are creating counter-hegemonic forms of democracy.

Table 1: Participation in the P.B. in Porto Alegre:

fonte:CRC- Coordenação de Relações com a Comunidade/Prefeitura de Porto Alegre.

Table 2: Participation in Belo Horizonte’s PB

Source: planing secretary

fonte:Prefeitura de Porto Alegre

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