Search

This paper contributes to the growing body of research on participatory democracy and the literature on associational democracy by exploring the impact that institutional reforms have on local-level configurations of civil society. In the 1980s a wide range of participatory experiments were initiated in Brazil, most notably Participatory Budgeting in municipal governance. Municipios that adopted PB in principle devolve much or all of the decision making on new investments to decentralized participatory forums. In this paper we consider the results of an eight-city matched-pair analysis conducted in 2004, in which we selected municipios that adopted PB in 1997-2000, and matched them with a similar municipio that did not in the same period, drawing from the full sample of municipios over 20,000 inhabitants. Building on relational theories of civil society, we show that PB has clear but limited effects on civil society. It moves civil society practices from clientelism to associationalism, but does not contribute to the capacity of civil society to self-organize, at least in the time-frame considered. We also show that this democratizing effect on civil society practices and networks is conditioned by pre-existing state-civil society relations.

Why has Venezuelan society not followed the same pattern as the rest of the Latin American countries? While the rest of the countries had military governments and economic crises, Venezuela had a stable democracy and economic prosperity. But now the situation has been reversed. Between 1926 and 1980 oil profits permitted a sustained, broad social and economic improvement, with increases in real wages for workers and increasing profits for businesses, all of which strengthened democracy. Starting in 1980, the situation changed and produced a collapse of the oil model, the ramifications of which are shown by the economic crisis of 1983, the popular revolt of 1989, and the coups d'etat of 1992, resulting in the election of presidents Caldera and Chavez. The traditional political parties lost power and new social actors appeared: the radical left, the unorganized civil society, the political right, and the military that controlled the state apparatus. This paper explains these changes by arguing that the oil profits have played a role in the formation of society: creation of social classes by the government, economic autonomy of the state, dependence on imported products, exaggerated growth of public employment, state domination in all areas of the economy, and the overall subsidizing of society. The Chavez government continues to adhere to the same profit-oriented, static, populist model that has made Venezuela more dependent on oil and less sustainable. Thus, the oil revenue that made democracy possible can also be seen as the basis for the installation of an authoritarian and military government in Venezuela.