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Varieties of Participatory Institutions and Interest Intermediation in Latin America

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Varieties of Participatory Institutions and Interest Intermediation in Latin America VARIETIES OF PARTICIPATORY INSTITUTIONS AND INTEREST INTERMEDIATION IN LATIN AMERICA Lindsay Mayka Jared Abbott Associate Professor of Government Post-Doctoral Research Fellow Colby College Center for Inter-American Policy and Research [email protected] Tulane University [email protected] Abstract: Most scholars assume that the objective of participatory institutions is to deepen democracy, improve the quality of governance, and enhance social inclusion, and existing studies highlight the litany of reasons why participatory institutions fail to meet this high bar for success. We diverge from this literature in questioning whether “success” for all participatory institutions means mobilizing the autonomous participation of marginalized groups to change policy outcomes in favor of the poor. Instead, we consider participatory institutions successful when they meet the political objectives they were created to advance. We develop a typology of four varieties of participatory institutions, which differ based on their foundational logics of interest intermediation and incorporation. Through case studies of participatory institutions in Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, and Ecuador, we show that participatory institutions can successfully restructure state-society relations in a range of ways, including increasing civil society influence over policymaking and government oversight, incorporating new voting blocs into parties’ electoral coalitions, and constraining the influence of disruptive social movements. Keywords: participatory institutions, good governance, participatory democracy, interest representation, civil society, citizen participation, party-voter linkages, policy change, Latin America Word count: 11,999 words Acknowledgements: We are grateful for feedback provided by Ruth Berins Collier, Kent Eaton, Tulia Falleti, Alisha Holland, Ben Goldfrank, Brian Palmer-Rubin, Jessica Rich, Ken Roberts, Rachel Schwartz, Heather Sullivan, Guillermo Toral, and participants in our 2021 REPAL panel. Research for this project was made possible through the financial support of the Fulbright Commission, the Social Science Research Council, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Since the historic wave of democratization during the 1980s and 1990s, inequality, social exclusion, and corruption continue to plague democracies across the globe. The persistence, and often intensification, of these problems has eroded support for representative democracy, cultivating fertile soil for illiberal populist movements from the Americas to Asia. Participatory institutions (PIs) have experienced a meteoric rise over the past three decades as a potential corrective to these trends. PIs are formal bodies that engage individual citizens and civil society actors directly in policy debates and decision-making processes. Building on pioneering experiences in Brazil during the early 1990s, a range of PIs sprang up across every country in Latin America, eventually spreading to Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America. Most scholars assume that the objective of PIs is to deepen democracy, improve the quality of governance, and enhance social inclusion. Existing studies highlight the litany of reasons why PIs on the ground fail to meet this high bar for success.1 Yet most PIs are not created with the primary goal of deepening democracy or improving governance, meaning that the failure of many participatory institutions to live up to these expectations should not be surprising. By contrast, we analyze PIs through the lens of interest intermediation, seeing them as vehicles for reshaping state-society relations for a range of political purposes. We take our inspiration from the classic literature on labor corporatism, which highlighted how different corporatist arrangements reflected diverging models of political incorporation seeking to either amplify or constrain the voice of societal interests (Schmitter 1974; R.B. Collier and Collier 1977). Likewise, we argue that PIs can advance diverse political projects, which yield distinct expectations for the form that participation will take and the anticipated effects of PIs on 1 Among many others, see: (Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva 2011; Falleti and Riofrancos 2018; McNulty 2019; Montambeault 2015; Wampler 2007). 1 democratic governance. Depending on the political project behind PIs’ adoption, the meaning of “success” can veer sharply away from the standards of participatory democracy and good governance. From this perspective, many PIs normally considered failures emerge as instances of success, since they effectively carry out the objectives for which they were adopted. The goal of this article is to develop a typology of four varieties of PIs, distinguished based on their foundational logics of interest intermediation. We show that two types of PIs are indeed adopted to advance aims consistent with participatory democracy and good governance. The first type, policy-reforming participatory institutions, are championed by civil society actors who seek to advance their policy-reform agenda from inside the state. The second type, good- governance participatory institutions, emerge from technocratic actors within the state (or donors) seeking to improve the effectiveness and efficacy of public programs by leveraging citizen input and oversight over service delivery. Yet in other cases, PIs are adopted by politicians to advance explicitly partisan agendas. The third type of PIs, party-building participatory institutions, are established by parties as a tool to build stronger linkages to voters and expand their electoral coalitions. Finally, legitimating participatory institutions are adopted by politicians who hope to mollify citizen demands or donor mandates for increased accountability and responsiveness by creating a toothless space for participation, disconnected from real decisionmaking. Like all institutions, PIs evolve over time, and the objectives of their creators often bear little resemblance to the functions they serve after adoption (Peck and Theodore 2015, xx). Moreover, there is always substantial variation in the subnational implementation of PIs. Nevertheless, we argue that the strategic motivations of those responsible for creating PIs go a long way in explaining PIs’ role in mediating state-society relations. Hence, 2 we focus on the founding logic of PIs, and bracket questions of institutional change, implementation, and unintended consequences for future research. Our study makes two important contributions to the literatures on participatory institutions and interest representation. First, we challenge the conventional wisdom that defines PI success according to the standards of participatory democracy or good governance. Instead, we redefine success and failure by emphasizing a PI’s effectiveness in achieving the political objectives behind its creation. We highlight how the political projects at the origin of a PI can shape its potential to achieve the goals of deepening democracy and improving governance, and set a research agenda about the causes and consequences of these four different types of PIs. Second, we contribute to the growing literature on how citizens and civil society groups advance their interests in contemporary Latin America. Recently, scholars have explored the structures of interest representation by examining transformations in the linkages between civil society groups and political parties (Rossi 2017; Rossi and Silva 2018; Palmer-Rubin 2019; Anria 2018) and ways that state institutions mobilize or demobilize interests in society (Rich 2019b; Mayka and Rich 2021; R.B. Collier and Handlin 2009). We highlight the importance of PIs as sites for interest representation that either mobilize or constrain organized interests, revealing the ways that PIs can sometimes weaken, rather than deepen, democracy.2 The paper begins by providing an overview of PIs in Latin America. Next, we review the extant literature on PIs to highlight the narrow definition of success used by most studies. We then develop a typology of four types of PIs identified above, which we illustrate with cases from Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, and Ecuador—all cases where PIs have “succeeded”, according to 2 On the role of participatory institutions in interest intermediation, see also Zaremberg, Guarneros-Meza, and Gurza Lavalle (2017). 3 their motivating logic. We conclude by discussing the implications of this typology for future research on PIs and interest intermediation. THE GLOBAL SCOPE OF PARTICIPATORY INSTITUTIONS PIs are formal institutions that include citizens and/or civil society actors directly in government decision-making, either in an advisory, oversight, or decision-making capacity. PIs come in many different forms, including participatory budgeting, in which citizens and civil society actors help determine how to spend state resources; public policy councils, in which representatives of civil society and the state deliberate over and approve budgets and policy proposals in health, education, and other areas; and prior consultation, a process that offers communities a chance to voice their concerns about proposed infrastructure or extractive projects—to name but a few. While no global census of PIs exists, there is little doubt that their scope is vast. All Latin American countries, as well as South Korea, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Africa (among others), established national frameworks supporting participatory
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