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This article examines how more democratic forms of state-citizen engagement can be engineered under less than favorable political conditions, through the case of the Village Development Committees under the Left Front government in West Bengal, India. Our research shows that these Committees embodied empowered participatory governance ideals and made meaningful contributions to citizens' participation within the local state, confirming the potential for well-designed institutions to deepen democratic engagement. However, this reform's abrupt reversal indicates that leftist parties are not automatically wholehearted supporters of empowered participatory governance, and that this reform needed to be connected to a wider set of claims about the Left Front's participatory successes, in order to build its legitimacy. Our wider argument is that research should examine not only the quality of participatory spaces themselves but also their political contexts, if we are to understand how experiments in empowered participatory governance can "scale up" and become durable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]