Thursday, January 29, 2009

PB Effects on Civil Society

Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Patrick Heller, and Marcelo Kunrath Silva.
"Making Space for Civil Society: Institutional Reforms and Local Democracy in Brazil."
Social Forces, Volume 86, Number 3, March 2008, pp. 911-936

Notes:

  • eight-city matched-pair analysis, grids and everything!
  • still qualitative
  • looks at eight Brazilian cities, paired by region, one using PB, other not
  • best predictor of PB adoption: Worker's Party vote share (917)
  • --fits Bräutigam's (2004) finding that political party is a bigger factor than existence of PB itself in promoting pro-poor policy
  • found PB fostered some movement toward more engagement
  • found PB did not move any communities toward greater self-organization among citizens
  • note these PB efforts came from above, the elected Worker's Party govts.
  • in one city, Mauá, "civil society experienced a contraction of sorts": less clientelism (good), but autonomy (bad), but they also did PB wrong: consultative rather than fully participatory; lacked transparency, responsiveness to community needs, and decision-making mandate
  • Happy line for my local research: "...far too little research has focused on local civil societies" (931). Even if I don't cover that element for Baiocchi et al., I provide a case study in that direction, data that can be built on to fill that gap.

 

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