Political Parties and Participatory Institutions: Building Social Coalitions?

• In Event: A New Look at Political Participation and Turnout

Abstract

Brazil has been a fertile place for successful democratic innovations since its re-democratization in the 1980s, ranging from local Participatory Budgeting up to more complex forms of Participatory Systems at different government levels. The left-wing Workers’ Party (PT) has had a prominent role in such diffusion process.
What’s the role of Civil Society participation to the incumbent party? I argue that there is a combination of ideological and pragmatic factors justifying the centrality of the adoption of participatory policies by the Workers Party’s administrations. This has led to a constant pursuit of institutional innovation, creating channels that allow civil society to interact with the state in a non-conflicting manner. The expansion of points of access to the State (Skocpol 1992) happened not only by the creation of participatory institutions, but also by the grating civil society a facilitated access to the government core.
Ideologically, as a left-wing party shaped by diverse social movements, PT has advocated since its foundation that democratic participation must not be restricted to elections. Despite the many crises the Party went through over the 36 years analyzed, its core ideology revolves around the idea of a government with “popular participation and inversion of priorities”, that is, the defense of the political, social and economic inclusion of popular and marginalized sectors.
However, from a pragmatic point of view, Civil Society participation in government enables it to broaden its social coalition, strengthening the Party’s ability to implement its own political agenda. In the case of parliamentary minority governments, this social support is essential for the government to be able to approve its policies. In the case of a parliamentary majority, a larger social coalition increases its leverage when negotiating with other powers to implement policies of interest to those movements, which are mostly aligned with those of the Party.
To Civil Society, the expansion of points of access to the State enables a broader internalization of its demands. Such incorporation can span several levels, ranging from contributing to the design of a given policy - its conception, categories, objectives - to participating in its actual implementation. In this sense, greater access to the State strengthens Civil Society organizations in a feedback cycle, increasing its leverage for future demands.
To the ruling Party, there are gains at two levels: at state capacity level and at the governance level. Civil society expertise and operation in specific policy and territorial areas broadens the State capacity to implement public policies. And having a wider and stronger social support base improves the Party political governance, by increasing its ability to put pressure on other powers to approve its political agenda.
This work takes a unique approach in democratic innovations studies, as it it focuses on the incumbent party role and not Civil Society itself, as most other works do. We also assume that there is no antagonism between participatory institutions and “traditional” representative institutions, with both being present in the same democratic political system but with distinct functions.
In this article, the focus is on analyzing the various players of this “social governance” system and how they interact with each other. Through examples of specific policies, we explain how participation channels worked as spaces for the presentation of demands, elaboration, negotiation and pressure for the approval of redistributive policies.
For my analysis I have conducted two case studies: the PT administrations in 1)the State of Rio Grande do Sul, from 1998 to 2002 and 2010 to 2014; and 2)the Federal Government, from 2003 to 2016. I use process tracing to draw a detailed reconstruction of a given political process to analyze the causal factors of my empirical problem (BEACH, PEDERSEN, 2013, Collier 2011). In both case studies my initial data collection came from interviews with political actors related to participatory policies, mainly the Secretariat of Planning, Management and Citizen Participation of the Government of the State of Rio Grande do Sul and the General Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic. I have conducted over 40 hours of in-depth interviews with 30 political actors who held positions in the Federal and Rio Grande do Sul State Governments. Interviewees were of various hierarchical ranks, ranging career civil servants to State Governors and cabinet Ministers.

Author

• Carla de Paiva Bezerra, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro