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We evaluate states’ capacity to deliver public education in Latin America. Education is essential for developing human capabilities and pursuing one’s best, chosen life. We focus on Brazil, where a right to an education is enshrined in the constitution. Brazil and other countries in the region have fallen short of achieving universal public education, and the quality of that education is low, on average, especially in poorer, rural areas. Yet, Brazil and many other countries also feature islands of educational excellence, where capacity is high and performance is strong. Thus, the wide variation in educational capacity begs an explanation. We build an explanation for national and local education capacity in two ways. First, we describe the historical evolution of education policy, spending, and capacity at the national level in Brazil and around the region. We then complement this analysis by evaluating common hypotheses surrounding variation in education capacity at the municipal level. The chapter advances knowledge surrounding state capacity in education by providing novel descriptive and explanatory evidence at multiple levels of government and, thus, lessons that are applicable to multiple contexts.

The article analyzes the factors associated with the discontinuation of participatory budgeting (PB) in Brazilian municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants between 2000 and 2016. We used econometric models to estimate PB’s discontinuation based on political explanatory variables and people’s local participation. The results indicate that discontinuation is associated: (i) positively with the election of a different local government, regardless of the winning party’s ideology; (ii) positively with the election of a local government with a left-wing ideology’; (iii) negatively with the election of a non-left-wing local government; (iv) positively with the election of a left-wing local government replacing another left-wing government. Changes in local government where other non-left-wing parties replace non-left-wing parties had no significant effect on discontinuation. The results contribute to our knowledge by showing the local and contextual factors that explain the discontinuation of participatory budgeting; this should help guide the design of participatory public policies and allow practitioners to reflect on the mechanisms that could be adopted locally to avoid discontinuation. The article also contributes to the literature by demonstrating the association between discontinuation and changes in left-wing local governments, which may prompt future research, given the unexpected result.

Participatory budgeting (PB) is designed to leverage local knowledge about community needs and translate spending preferences into tangible community development action by giving communities control over key budgetary resources. Moreover, PB participants learn about decision-making processes in development policy and can organize to pursue their communities’ interests beyond the PB process by engaging with government and civil society. PB advocates hope that infrastructure, service delivery, and, ultimately, well-being will improve for underserved communities and groups that have been historically excluded from the perspective of representative democracy. This article presents the theoretical logic connecting PB to community development and summarizes the global evidence from studies that test the theoretical propositions above. We find evidence for PB’s impact on community development performance in several important contexts. However, we also note that many hypotheses have yet to be tested in rigorous, large-N, comparative studies. There is thus considerable room to evaluate PB’s impact in the future.

PurposeParticipatory budgeting's (PB’s) proponents hope that bringing development projects to historically underserved communities will improve well-being by extending infrastructure and services. This article details the logic connecting PB to well-being, describes the evolution of PB programs as they spread around the world and consolidates global evidence from research that tests hypotheses on PB's impact. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.Design/methodology/approachUnstructured literature review and comparative case study across five global regions.FindingsThe authors find evidence for PB's impact on well-being in several important contexts, mostly not only in Brazil, but also in Peru and South Korea. They also find that very few rigorous, large-N, comparative studies have evaluated the relationship between PB and well-being and that the prospects for social accountability and PB's sustainability for well-being are not equally strong in all contexts. They argue that PB has great potential to improve well-being, but program designs, operational rules and supporting local conditions must be favorable to realize that potential.Originality/valueThis is one of the few efforts to build theory on where and why the authors would expect to observe relationships between PB and well-being. It is also one of the first to consolidate global evidence on PB's impact.

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...

Cities have initiated e-participation programs to cut costs, promote transparency and engage more citizens in recent years. Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic innovation that is said to e...

Governments in sub-Saharan Africa began to adopt PB in the early 2000s. The World Bank, USAID, DFID, and other international organization led the push to expand PB. By 2019, the region included more than nine hundred programs. PB’s diffusion across sub-Saharan Africa has led to its transformation in scale, rules, and impact. Most PB programs in sub-Saharan Africa focus on building accountability and allowing participants to select small-scale development projects. These programs are located both in major cities (Maputo, Nairobi) as well as in poor, rural areas across the region. These programs are intended to improve local governance, but the involvement of international donors means that local governments must address their concerns as well as those of participants. The programs also emphasize placing new development projects in poor, marginalized communities, thus retaining potential for improving well-being. This chapter documents these trends by focusing on PB in Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda.

Participatory Budgeting (PB) incorporates citizens directly into budgetary decision-making. It continues to spread across the globe as government officials and citizens adopt this innovative program in the hopes of strengthening accountability, civil society, and well-being. Governments often transform PB’s rules and procedures to meet local needs, thus creating wide variation in how PB programs function. Some programs retain features of radical democracy, others focus on community mobilization, and yet other programs seek to promote participatory development. This book provides a theoretical and empirical explanation to account for widespread variation in PB’s adoption, adaptation, and impacts. The book first develops six “PB types,” then, to illustrate patterns of change across the globe, four empirical chapters present a rich set of case studies that illuminate the wide differences among these programs. The empirical chapters are organized regionally, with chapters on Latin America, Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and North America. The empirical chapters demonstrate that there are temporal, spatial, economic, and organizational factors that produce different programs across regions but similar programs within each region. A key finding is that the change in PB rules and design is now leading to significant differences in the outcomes these programs produce. We find that some programs successfully promote accountability, expand civil society, and improve well-being, but, that we continue to lack evidence that might demonstrate if PB leads to significant social or political change elsewhere.

This chapter develops a framework to explain how and why governments adopt and adapt PB as it spreads around the world. The chapter identifies three waves of adoption: 1989 through the mid-1990s; mid-1990s through mid-2000s; and mid-2000s through 2020. Within each wave, the authors identify where PB is adopted and who is driving adoption. They identify and explain key transformations in the areas of scale/place of adoption, decision-making rules, and social justice considerations during each wave. This chapter also provides a typology to help categorize the global patterns of change that we see across the PB landscape. The chapter identifies six types of PB programs, including: Empowered Democracy and Redistribution; Deepening Democracy through Community Mobilization; Mandated by National Governments; Digital Participation; Social Accountability and Development; Efficient Governance. The typology links PB’s core principles and the political motivations of the main actors promoting adoption. The typology then also captures the differences across the cases and helps the reader better understand the diversity of PB programs and outcomes.

Latin America is PB’s birthplace and the region where it was first widely adopted. PB currently exists in almost every country of this region of the world. This chapter documents PB development in Brazil, its spread from Brazil to other countries as well as PB’s transformation since the 1990s, when it changed from a social justice program to a policy tool that promotes citizen empowerment and community mobilization. Latin America also led the way with the first mandated programs, as Peru’s national government was the first country in the world to require that all subnational governments adopt PB. Latin American PB programs are among the most studied in the world, which means that solid research findings identify when and where PB produces significant social and political change. Most importantly, there are many comparative, longitudinal, and large-N studies from Brazil that demonstrate that PB is generating positive change. But, research on other countries, such as Peru and Mexico, suggest that PB’s impact is much weaker in those countries. The chapter provides a summary of the rich body of evidence that has emerged since 1989, and describes PB in Brazil, Peru, El Salvador, and Mexico.

The spread of PB in the North Atlantic region (Europe, the United States, and Canada) is taking place as citizen apathy, declining trust, social exclusion, and growing inequalities spread in these wealthier democracies. By 2016, major cities such as New York City, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Toronto, and Seville adopted some form of PB. The national governments in Poland and Portugal now mandate some form of PB. The authors see significant institutional innovation in these PB processes as PB’s original rules have been reimagined to address different types of problems. New York City and Chicago initiated their PB programs at sub-municipal levels. Paris, Madrid, and Barcelona had adapted their PB programs to strongly emphasize online participation. At the broadest level, PB in Europe and North America is more heavily geared toward civic education and community empowerment than toward the redistribution of spending priorities. In some place PB remains a democratic institution that retains some of the radical features of the first wave but it is also a policymaking tool in other places, designed to generate government efficiencies. Most importantly, most programs retain the radical idea that a wide variety of citizens, especially those from politically weaker and more marginalized groups, should be directly involved in decision-making.

This chapter summarizes the main findings about PB’s adoption, adaptation, and impact. It raises questions about PB’s future and the limited evidence that continues to hamper researchers and policymakers’ ability to make key policy recommendations. PB is now used in settings as diverse as large cities in wealthy industrialized democracies, rural, low-income villages in countries governed by semi-authoritarian regimes, municipalities of middle-income countries in the Global South, and a variety of contexts in authoritarian countries. This diversity of program types and institutional contexts showcases the allure of PB around the world. Yet, it also highlights the challenges facing policymakers as they consider creating their own programs. The chapter ends with a conceptual discussion to guide policymakers as they adopt or support PB in the future.

This chapter develops an original “theory of change” that connects PB programs to three community-level outcomes: the promotion of accountability, expansion of civil society, and improvements in well-being. To explain the variation in outcomes, this explanatory framework includes macro-level (political context, decentralization, economic conditions) and meso-level (government support, configuration of civil society, state capacity) factors that condition PB programs’ impacts. The discussion then moves beyond the macro and meso to drill down to “variation in program design.” The chapter identifies several rules (scale/level of adoption, presence of social justice rules, program emphasis on social inclusion, vote rules, and oversight process) that significantly influence the outcomes that PB programs produce. Thus, this chapter illuminates how variation in the macro, meso, and PB design rules condition and constrain the types of outcomes associated with PB. The chapter concludes by linking the theory of change to the PB Types (introduced in Chapter 1) to theorize how each PB program type is likely to be associated with distinct impacts.

Extensive experimentation with new democratic institutions took place in Asia across the 1980s and 1990s, but PB only formally arrived at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The spread of PB across Asia thus stems from democratic impulses to empower citizens in new democracies. This chapter focuses on three countries—South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia—to illuminate key trends in the region. The chapter shows that a small number of local governments initially adopted “PB-like” programs. Positive evaluations of these programs then spurred national governments to mandate PB to incorporate large segments of the population in public decision-making. An additional focus, toward the end of this chapter, is the expansion of PB to China because it helps to illuminate how the malleability of PB’s rules enables local governments to implement the program in authoritarian contexts; the use of PB by authoritarian governments is one of the most controversial issues facing PB today. The cases from Asia reviewed in this chapter offer the promise of social and political change. However, the limitations on evidence means that enough information about these programs’ specific impacts is still lacking.

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.

Como a democracia contribui para melhorar o bem-estar? Neste artigo, separamos os componentes da prática democrática – eleições, participação social, expansão dos programas sociais, capacidade administrativa municipal – para identificar sua relação com o bem-estar. Nossa análise de um conjunto de dados original abrangendo mais de 5.550 municípios brasileiros demonstra que eleições competitivas sozinhas não explicam variação nas taxas de mortalidade infantil, um resultado associado ao bem-estar. Vamos além das eleições para mostrar como instituições participativas, programas sociais e capacidade administrativa municipal podem interagir para se apoiar e reduzir as taxas de mortalidade infantil. O resultado é uma nova compreensão de como os diferentes aspectos da democracia trabalham juntos para melhorar uma característica essencial do desenvolvimento humano. DEMOCRACY AR WORK: moving beyond elections to improve well-beingHow does democracy work to improve well-being? In this paper, 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. Our analysis of an original dataset covering over 5,550 Brazilian municipalities demonstrates that competitive elections alone do not explain variation in infant mortality rates, one outcome associated with wellbeing. 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. The result is a new understanding of how different aspects of democracy work together to improve a key feature of human development.Keywords: Democracy, Well-being, Participation, Social programs, Brazil. DÉMOCRATIE EN ACTION: aller au-delà des élections pour améliorer le bien-êtreComment la démocratie contribue-t-elle à améliorer le bien-être? Dans cet article, nous séparons les éléments constitutifs de la pratique démocratique - élections, participation sociale, expansion des programmes sociaux, capacité administrative municipale - pour identifier sa relation avec le bien-être. Notre analyse d’un ensemble de données original couvrant plus de 5 550 municipalités brésiliennes montre que les élections compétitives n’expliquent pas à elles seules la variation des taux de mortalité infantile, résultat lié au bien-être. Nous allons au-delà des élections pour montrer comment les institutions participatives, les programmes sociaux et la capacité administrative municipale peuvent interagir pour se soutenir mutuellement et réduire les taux de mortalité infantile. Le résultat est une nouvelle compréhension de la façon dont différents aspects de la démocratie travaillent ensemble pour améliorer une caractéristique essentielle du développement humain.Mots clés: Démocratie, Bien-être, Participation, Programmes sociaux, Brésil.

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.