Making Democracy Real: Participatory Governance in Urban Latin America
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Making Democracy Real: Participatory Governance in Urban Latin America By Gabriel Bodin Hetland A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Michael B Burawoy, Chair Professor Peter B Evans Professor Laura J Enriquez Professor Dylan J Riley Professor Michael J Watts Summer 2015 Abstract Making Democracy Real: Participatory Governance in Urban Latin America by Gabriel Bodin Hetland Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology University of California, Berkeley Professor Michael Burawoy, Chair A growing body of literature shows that experiments with participatory governance, which most often occur at the urban level, can help make democracy more real by establishing institutional mechanisms that effectively link what citizens want and what governments deliver. Within this literature there is broad agreement that successful participatory governance is most likely when two conditions are present: a left-of-center party with an ideological commitment to participatory democracy is in local office and local civil society is strong and autonomous. This dissertation shows that neither of these conditions is necessary for successful participatory governance by demonstrating that participatory reform can succeed in making democracy more real in cities run by right-of- center parties and when local civil society lacks autonomy vis-à-vis the national state and ruling party. These claims are based on nineteen months of ethnographic fieldwork comparing participatory reform in four cities in Venezuela and Bolivia, with research conducted on a city governed by a Left and a Right party in each country. To explain the unexpected findings generated by this research I develop a novel framework for understanding participatory governance centered on the concept of an urban political regime, which refers to the overall pattern of state-society relations prevailing in a given city. Data from the four cities researched shows that the importance and effectiveness of participatory decision-making varies markedly across different urban political regimes: in some regimes participatory decision-making is central and effective, in others it is practically non-existent and ineffective and in still others it is in-between. To explain the emergence of particular urban political regimes in particular cities, and transitions from one regime to another within a given city, this study examines the interaction between socioeconomic structure, historical legacies of past regimes and national political change. This framework facilitates analysis of participatory governance that goes beyond binary distinctions between success and failure. It also draws attention to two sets of relationships that have received little attention from other scholars of participation: between the past and present, and between local and national politics. Finally it highlights the mutability and dynamic nature of political processes. In so doing this study shows that democracy is not a finished product but an ongoing process. 1 CONTENTS Preface ii Acknowledgments v Introduction 1 1. Urban Political Regimes 15 Introduction to Venezuelan Cases: National Political Change in Venezuela 21 2. Torres: Participatory Democracy 28 3. Sucre: Administered Democracy 52 Introduction to Bolivian Cases: National Political Change in Bolivia 72 4. Santa Cruz: Technocratic Clientelism 79 5. El Alto: Anarcho-Clientelism 106 Conclusion 131 References 138 Appendix: Methods and Data 144 i Preface This dissertation examines efforts to make democracy real in urban Latin America. The impetus behind the project is twofold. First there is mounting evidence that democracy, as it currently practiced in my home country, the United States, and much of the world, has become increasing unreal. The central institutions of modern democracy – periodic elections leading to representative governments – seem increasingly incapable of fulfilling the basic purpose of democracy, allowing the many to have a say in how they are ruled. On innumerable issues, relating to healthcare, housing, unemployment benefits, education, infrastructure, bank regulation, foreign policy and more, there is often a significant gap between the preferences expressed by ordinary citizens and the policies pursued by political elites.1 One of the main reasons for this gap is the pernicious and growing influence of money in politics, which highlights the increasing subordination of political institutions to corporate interests. It is sad, but hardly surprising, that in the face of the commodification of democracy (in which the guiding principle is not one person, one vote but rather one dollar, one vote) millions of ordinary citizens, who lack the resources needed to buy political influence, turn away from politics entirely. Witness the dismal turnout in the November 2014 midterm elections in the US when barely a third of eligible voters (36.6%) turned out to vote, the lowest rate in seven decades. While leading some citizens to disavow politics, the failings of actually existing democracy have led others to seek to transform democracy by creating participatory institutions that provide a more effective link between what citizens want and what governments deliver. The second motivation behind this study is the hope that these efforts will succeed in making democracy more real by providing ordinary people tools to affect the decisions that affect their lives. This study focuses on Latin America because over the last twenty-five years the region has experienced a remarkable transformation, from a textbook example of unreal democracy to a pioneer of democratic experiments, such as participatory budgeting. Most of these experiments have taken place in cities run by left-of-center parties. Participatory reform has also occurred in cities governed by centrist and right-of-center parties. Yet there has been little research examining such cases. This is partly due to the fact that such cases are less common, though growing in number. It may also be due to the plausible assumption that participatory reform implemented by non-left, and particularly conservative, parties is likely to be less successful in terms of allowing citizens to exercise genuine control over political decision-making. (This assumption is plausible in light of the historical record of centrist and conservative parties in Latin America. Until the late twentieth century centrist and, particularly, rightwing political forces regularly undermined democracy in Latin America. By the 1990s these forces had largely, and often reluctantly, accepted democracy, but the version of democracy promoted by the Center and Right was of liberal, representative democracy, not participatory democracy.) Scholars’ tendency to focus on cases of participatory success may (unconsciously) steer them away from studying participation implemented by centrist and conservative parties. The assumption that participatory reform is more likely to succeed in cities governed by the Left rather than the Right (or Center) has not, to my knowledge, been 1 A separate but related issue is the ability of elites to influence ordinary citizens’ views in ways inimical to democratic principles by spreading misleading and outright false information through corporate media. ii systematically examined. This study seeks to do this. To gain traction on this issue I conducted nineteen months of ethnographic research on participatory reform in cities governed by Left and Right parties in Venezuela and Bolivia. I chose Venezuela and Bolivia for two reasons. First, within Latin America these are the two countries where participatory democracy has been most central in recent years. Following the elections of Hugo Chávez in 1998 and Evo Morales in 2005, participatory democracy was enshrined in both countries’ new constitutions and was (and in the case of Morales and Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, still is) a key facet of both leaders’ political discourse. Second, the similarities between Venezuela and Bolivia – e.g. Chávez’s and Morales’ fiery critiques of capitalism and imperialism and embrace of state-led development and, in a more rhetorical and uneven fashion, popular power and socialism – have led many commentators to lump the countries together as part of Latin America’s “radical”, “populist” or “bad” Left. Yet, there is a key difference in the two countries’ processes of transformation: Venezuela’s has been more top-down and state-led, while Bolivia’s has been more bottom-up and society-led. Comparing the two countries provides a way to test whether and how this difference matters to local-level participatory reform. My research design, which combines cross- and sub-national comparison, allows participatory reform to be compared along two axes: a Left-Right axis, in terms of the party in local office, and a state-versus-society-led-change axis, in terms of national context. There is a strong consensus amongst scholars that participatory reform is most likely to succeed when two factors are present: a pro-participation Left party is in local office and there is a strong and autonomous civil society. This led me to formulate two hypotheses about the likely findings of my research. The first was that I would find greater success, defined as participatory institutions that allow ordinary citizens to effectively control local political decisions (particularly those related to the