Public Participation and Decentralization in Brazil. From radical democracy to participatory democracy

This paper enhances the understanding of Brazil’s experience with participatory democracy by shedding light on its radical democratic foundations. It demonstrates that participatory democracy is largely rooted in the radical democratic ideas advanced by the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) in the 1980s and 1990s. These ideas are shown to have emerged from the intertwined struggles for workplace self-management, citizen participation in government, and local governments’ autonomy that preceded full-scale democratization. Against this background, the paper argues that public participation and decentralization emerged as two interlinked dimensions of the processes of re-democratization and re-federalization, largely echoing the early PT’s municipalist and radical democratic proposals. As such, the paper calls for a more critical assessment of the societal forces and ideas that have shaped the participatory institutions of Brazil’s multi-tiered governance system. More broadly, this inquiry engages with the scholarly debate on the interplay between federalism and participatory-deliberative democracy, highlighting the complexity of the theoretical, institutional, and empirical convergence points that define this relationship.