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Despite participatory institutions' increasing ubiquity, we know little about their effects on governance and well-being. What we do know comes largely from Brazil, where positive outcomes have been attributed to civil society's role in implementation. Often, however, participatory institutions are imposed by national governments, with little civil society engagement. In these cases, scholars have argued, participatory institutions are unlikely to improve governance and well-being, as civil society is not present to unlock the institutions' potential. We test this proposition in Peru, the first country featuring government mandated participatory institutions for all subnational governments. We find, surprisingly, that Peru's participatory budgeting process increased pro-poor spending and improved citizen's quality of life. We attribute these outcomes to reduced information asymmetries, made possible by the central role played by an influential and autonomous government agency. We employ a unique panel dataset, as well as an original survey and extensive interviews with government and civil society actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Conceptualizes varieties of participatory institutions according to their function in interest intermediation. • Distinguishes based on what objectives participatory institutions advance, who participates, and how participants connect to the state. • Analyzes five cases from Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, and Ecuador. • Develops tools to explore why participatory institutions succeed in meeting their objectives, and how they change over time. Although participatory institutions have become ubiquitous in contemporary politics, they often serve such different objectives that viewing the institutions as part of the same phenomenon can produce more confusion than clarity. We argue that participatory institutions can serve distinct and even opposite functions in interest intermediation, and develop a conceptual framework that distinguishes participatory institutions based on 1) what political project they were established to advance, 2) whose participation is channeled into these venues, and 3) how participatory institutions engage participants in the policymaking. We illustrate this framework with cases from Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, and Ecuador. We show that participatory institutions can serve a wide array of political projects that connect citizens to the state in radically different ways, including restructuring state-society relations to empower marginalized groups, increasing civil society influence over policymaking and government oversight, expanding parties' electoral coalitions, and constraining the influence of disruptive social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]