Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
List of Acronyms
Overview
1. Democracy, Participation, and Decentralization
2. A Tale of Three Cities
3. Caracas: Scarce Resources, Fierce Opposition, and Restrictive Design
4. Montevideo: From Rousing to Regulating Participation
5. Porto Alegre: Making Participatory Democracy Work
6. Stronger Citizens, Stronger State?
Conclusion: The Diffusion of Participatory Democracy and the Rise of the Left
Bibliography
Index
Benjamin Goldfrank is Assistant Professor at the Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University.
“Benjamin Goldfrank’s proposal to compare various leftist-sponsored
experiments in collective participation in local decision-making
represents a valuable contribution. . . . This book is an example
of exceptional scholarship. It is well focused, explores the
theoretical and practical implications of its findings and draws on
extensive fieldwork and considerable secondary literature.”—Steve
Ellner Journal of Latin American Studies
“This is a superb book, built on in-depth comparisons of local
experiments with participatory processes in Venezuela, Uruguay, and
Brazil, mainly in the 1990s. . . . Benjamin Goldfrank’s book should
become a key reference on the deepening of local democracy in Latin
America and beyond. . . .“Beyond elaborating a compelling,
well-substantiated, and substantively significant argument, this
book helps to extend a literature that deserves continued
attention. Goldfrank rightly recognizes the impressive works on
participatory democracy in these cases individually, as well as
comparative subnational work. . . .“ . . . This book delivers on
all counts. It will be referenced for its arguments, but it also
deserves to be read as a book. It is a model for careful empirical
work and theory building on questions of lasting and growing
importance.”—J. Tyler Dickovick Latin American Politics and
Society
“An incisive and thorough analysis of the strengths and weaknesses
of experiences of participatory democracy in contemporary Latin
America.”—F. E. Panizza, The London School of Economics and
Political Science
“Before leftist parties began electing presidents in Latin America
at the turn of the century, they were electing mayors and
experimenting with participatory forms of democracy at the
municipal level. In this outstanding book, Benjamin Goldfrank
explores the most important of these participatory experiments in
Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Drawing from intensive field
research and original public opinion surveys, Goldfrank analyzes
why some participatory programs are more effective than others, and
he carefully explains how these different outcomes relate to the
institutional features of decentralization policies and the nature
of partisan opposition. For anyone who seeks to understand the
opportunities for—and the constraints on—the ‘deepening’ of
democracy in contemporary Latin America, this insightful book is
essential reading.”—Kenneth M. Roberts, Cornell University
“This volume is a well-researched comparative study of the
empowerment of local citizens in the 1990s in three South American
cities: Caracas, Venezuela; Montevideo, Uruguay; and Porto Alegre,
Brazil.”—S. L. Rozman Choice
“Goldfrank shows how participatory democracy's biggest challenges,
including social inequality, bureaucratic inefficiency, and
political rivalry, can be surmounted.”—NACLA Report on the
Americas
“Goldfrank has constructed an excellent and timely empirically
grounded study into the emergence in the late 1980s and early 1990s
of Latin American participatory innovations which resulted from
attempts to deepen democracy by decentralising the vote for city
mayors to the electorate. . . .. . . Deepening Local Democracy in
Latin America provides an insight into the development of the left
as a result of decentralisation and participation, by providing a
detailed, comparative account of how they were opposed, badly
designed or successfully supported by a range of government
parties. Furthermore, the extent to which the quality of democracy
varied across the three cases is explored through the degrees to
which participatory innovations were decentralised, the degree of
opposition they had, and whether they had an open, regulated or
restrictive design. In its empirical approach and theoretical
underwriting, the work succeeds in providing a convincing insight
into the various issues facing citizen participation in Latin
America. . . . As Goldfrank applies his understanding of
participation in Latin America more recently in the conclusion, his
work stands as an excellent statement on deepening democracy in
Latin America, as well as the obstacles this process can
encounter.”—Adam Gill Political Studies Review
“This is an impressive book and a major contribution to the debates
about the direction of democracy and of the Left in Latin
America.”—Alan Angell Bulletin of Latin American Research
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