Why Has Participatory Budgeting Adoption Declined in Brazil? Carla de Paiva Bezerra PhD Candidate University of São Paulo (USP)
[email protected] | carlabezerra.info Murilo de Oliveira Junqueira Assistant Professor Federal University of Piauí (UFPI)
[email protected] Version 3.1 Prepared for the 114th Annual Meeting & Exhibition of the American Political Science Association, “Democracy and Its Discontents” Boston, Massachusetts August 30 – September 2, 2018 The authors wish to acknowledge Paolo Spada for providing the PB dataset and are thankful for his comments about the paper. The authors appreciate the extremely important comments and suggestions made throughout different stages of this paper made by Marta Arretche, Ruth Berins Collier, Adrian Gurza Lavalle, Ursula Peres, Wagner Romão, Rachel Bernhard, Anna Callis, Christopher Carter, Tanu Kumar, Natália Moreira, Rhea Myerscough, Mathias Poertner, Andres Schipani and Guadalupe Tuñón. The authors also wish to acknowledge the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development – Brazil (CNPq) funding. 2 Abstract Why Has Participatory Budgeting Adoption Declined in Brazil? Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a policy innovation that originated in Brazil and is recognized worldwide by scholars and international organizations as an effective policy tool for directly involving the population in decisions about the local budget. Its diffusion in Brazil was strongly stimulated by the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores - PT), as a showcase of the "Petista Way of Governing". However, when the Party took the Federal Office, it abandoned PB as its main participatory policy priority. The motivation for such drastic change in policy preference remains unexplained, by both scholars and the Party itself. To understand the reasons for it, we present an original hypothesis, based on party adaptation to increasing fiscal and budgetary rigidity.