Effectiveness and institutionalization of social welfare councils: patterns and variations in participation in Brazilian municipalities (2012-2018)

Abstract In this article, we identified patterns and variations that occurred over time in decision-making routines and in the operational conditions of the municipal councils of social welfare in Brazil through experiences with different contextual cuts, considering the period of institutional consolidation of the policy in the 2000s and the change of orientation that it suffered after 2016. Accordingly, we identified groups of councils with similar profiles in their characteristics and based on that we present an index to measure the effectiveness of these instances in the social welfare policy. The data is from the SUAS Census (2012-2018) and allows us to offer a diagnosis of the institutionalization of the set of municipal councils throughout a historical series, a challenge rarely faced by the studies on participatory institutions.