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Under new democratic regimes, civil society organizations (CSOs) alter their political strategies to better engage public officials and citizens as well as to influence broader political debates. In Brazil, between 1990 and 2010, CSOs gained access to a broad participatory architecture as well as a reconfigured state, inducing CSOs to employ a wider range of strategies. This article uses a political network approach to illuminate variation in CSOs’ political strategies across four policy arenas and show how the role of the state, the broader configuration of civil society, the interests of elected officials, and the rules of participatory institutions interact to produce this variation. Data for this article’s analysis come from a survey of three hundred CSO leaders in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte. The survey identified the strategies they employed to promote policy change and direct resource allocation in the arenas of participatory budgeting, health care, social services, and housing. Sociographs generated from survey results reveal a distinct clustering within each policy arena of the strategies employed by CSOs, providing further support to the usefulness of the analytical framework.

Brazil has made striking gains in public health since its democratisation in the mid-1980s. Previous research credits widespread economic growth and the creation of widespread social programmes for...

Social accountability institutions are at the forefront of democratic reformers’ efforts to improve well‐being by harnessing the power of citizen participation. This article builds on recent research identifying a positive relationship between participatory budgeting (PB) and well‐being. The article is the first large‐N study to identify relationships between specific rules of PB programme design and well‐being. A unique dataset of 114 Brazilian municipalities with PB programmes from 2009 to 2016 is constructed to evaluate whether internal mechanisms within PB explain variation in local infant mortality rates – an outcome associated with wellbeing. Hypotheses are tested that correspond to citizen participation, the scope of deliberation and embeddedness within local institutions. It is found that PB programmes are associated with lower infant mortality rates when they broaden participation, expand deliberation and embed the new institutions in ongoing policy‐making venues. The results offer a framework for designing PB programmes and other social accountability institutions to maximise impact.

How does democracy work to improve well-being? In this article, we disentangle the component parts of democratic practice—elections, civic participation, expansion of social provisioning, local administrative capacity—to identify their relationship with well-being. We draw from the citizenship debates to argue that democratic practices allow citizens to gain access to a wide range of rights, which then serve as the foundation for improving social well-being. Our analysis of an original dataset covering over 5,550 Brazilian municipalities from 2006 to 2013 demonstrates that competitive elections alone do not explain variation in infant mortality rates, one outcome associated with well-being. We move beyond elections to show how participatory institutions, social programs, and local state capacity can interact to buttress one another and reduce infant mortality rates. It is important to note that these relationships are independent of local economic growth, which also influences infant mortality. The result of our thorough analysis offers a new understanding of how different aspects of democracy work together to improve a key feature of human development.

Participatory Budgeting (PB) is conceptually powerful because it ties the normative values of non-elite participation and deliberation to specific policymaking processes. It is a democratic policymaking process that enables citizens to allocate public monies. PB has spread globally, coming to the United States in 2009. Our analysis shows that the types of institutional designs used in the United States are quite different from the original Brazilian programs. What explains the variation in PB institutional design between Brazil and the United States? Most PB cases in the US are district-level whereas in Brazil, PB cases are mainly municipal. We account for this variation by analyzing the electoral system; configuration of civil society; political moment of adoption; and available resources. We use case study analysis to account for this variation in institutional design. We then assess how the different rule design is likely to create a different set of institutional outcomes.

Traditionally, governments seek to mobilize tax revenues by expanding their enforcement of existing tax regimes and facilitating tax payments. However, enforcement and facilitation can be costly and produce diminishing marginal returns if citizens are unwilling to pay their taxes. This paper addresses gaps in knowledge about tax compliance, by asking a basic question: what explains why citizens and businesses comply with tax rules? To answer this question, the paper shows how the voluntary adoption of two different types of participatory governance institutions influences municipal tax collection in Brazil. Municipalities that voluntarily adopt participatory institutions collect significantly higher levels of taxes than similar municipalities without these institutions. The paper provides evidence that moves scholarship on tax compliance beyond enforcement and facilitation paradigms, while offering a better assessment of the role of local democratic institutions for government performance and tax compliance.

Policy analysis, as persuasively argued by Leonardo Secchi in his article, is weakly institutionalized in Brazil. The most intriguing part of Secchi’s argument is that that there is now the opportu...

As new political institutions provide Brazilians with unprecedented access to policymaking and decisionmaking venues, politicians and activists have undertaken reform efforts to promote institutional arrangements partly designed to expand accountability. The expansion of participatory decisionmaking venues may grant citizens greater authority, but these institutions could also undermine municipal councils’ ability to curb the prerogatives of mayors. This article analyzes participatory budgeting in São Paulo, Recife, and Porto Alegre to illustrate that mayors have differing capacities to implement their policy preferences, and this greatly affects how accountability may be extended.

In this special issue of the Journal of Public Deliberation, multiple faces of Participatory Budgeting programs are revealed. The articles demonstrate that there is no standardized set of “best practices” that governments are adopting, but there are a broader set of principles that are adapted by local governments to meet local circumstances. Adopt and adapt appears to be the logic behind many PB programs.