Bootstrapping Democracy: Transforming Local Governance and Civil Society in Brazil

Despite increasing interest in how involvement in local government can improve governance and lead to civic renewal, questions remain about participation's real impact. This book investigates participatory budgeting―a mainstay now of World Bank, UNDP, and USAID development programs―to ask whether its reforms truly make a difference in deepening democracy and empowering civil society. Looking closely at eight cities in Brazil, comparing those that carried out participatory budgeting reforms between 1997 and 2000 with those that did not, the authors examine whether and how institutional reforms take effect.

Bootstrapping Democracy highlights the importance of local-level innovations and democratic advances, charting a middle path between those who theorize that globalization hollows out democracy and those who celebrate globalization as a means of fostering democratic values. Uncovering the state's role in creating an "associational environment," it reveals the contradictory ways institutional reforms shape the democratic capabilities of civil society and how outcomes are conditioned by relations between the state and civil society.

Gianpaolo Baiocchi is Associate Professor of Sociology at Brown University. He is the author of Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre (Stanford University Press, 2005) and Radicals in Power: The Workers' Party and Experiments in Urban Democracy in Brazil(2003). Patrick Heller is Associate Professor of Sociology at Brown University. He is the coauthor of Social Democracy in the Global Periphery: Origins and Prospects (2007) and author of The Labor Development: Workers and the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India (1999). Marcelo Kunrath Silva is Associate Professor of Sociology and Rural Sociology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.