Participatory Democracy in Latin America

Despite the recent expansion of innovative democratic experiments, scholars have observed that much of what has been written focuses on theoretical issues and normative debates. There is relatively little empirical research and a lack of comparative work that contrasts different models of citizen participation.These data were collected as part of a PhD thesis project intended to addresses these gaps in the literature. The project compares local participatory mechanisms in three countries with different models of participatory design: Venezuela’s “radical” participatory democracy, Chile’s “pragmatic” efforts at expanding participation and Ecuador’s “hybrid” model that demonstrates features of both. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, it compares outcomes produced by participatory mechanisms in these countries and identifies five factors that enhance or diminish their ability to generate positive outcomes: decision-making and implementation capacity, quality of deliberation, inclusiveness, levels of engagement and the nature of relationships between participatory mechanisms and local authorities. The findings reveal that the “radical” model does not produce significantly better outcomes despite its promises of deepening the quality of democracy. Institutional design and state discourse on democracy are therefore less important than the extent to which these five factors are present. The data include interviews and surveys.