Can Participation Shape National Politics? An Empirical Answer for a Theoretical Question

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2105111

Can Participation Shape National Politics?

An Empirical Answer for a Theoretical Question

Thamy Pogrebinschi

Institute of Social and Political Studies, State University of Rio de Janeiro (IESP - UERJ)

Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB)

[email protected] / [email protected]

David Samuels

Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota

[email protected]

Prepared for presentation at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science

Association, New Orleans. We than

mailto:[email protected]




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In her 2011 APSA Presidential Address, Carole Pateman (2012) lamented the fact that

the role of participation continues to get scant attention from mainstream empirical scholars of

democratic governance around the world, besides taking a theoretical back seat to arguments

about deliberative democracy. This has remained true despite the “third wave” of

democratization, despite established democracies’ efforts to promote and consolidate new

democratic regimes, and despite both a boom in practices of participatory governance around the

world and a revival of scholarly interest in democratic theory. Pateman’s speech sought to draw

attention to new participatory practices, and urge greater theoretical and empirical scholarship on

how participation can impact the performance and practice of democracy writ large.

The status of “participatory democracy” in political science, we suggest, will only change

if it can be demonstrated that institutions of participatory governance can overcome two key

theoretical challenges, both of which speak to participation’s relevance for national politics (and

not only local public administration): whether it threatens the stability of democracy, and

whether it can contribute to the performance of democracy. That is, in this paper we are

unconcerned with the main normative argument advanced about the impact of participation (or

deliberation), rooted in Rousseau and J.S. Mill – its hypothesized transformative or educative

effect on individual citizens (Mansbridge 1999). Instead, contrary to all previous research,

through an exploration of Brazil’s National Public Policy Conferences (NPPCs) we seek to

demonstrate that participatory governance practices can and do impact important public policy

decisions at the national level.

To root our argument, we need to define participation, and to define democracy. Our

working definition of participation comes from Rousseau, via Pateman: participation in making

decisions about collective life (1970, 24; see also Pateman 2012, 15). This is a “thick” rather


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than “thin” notion of participation, as it certainly entails far greater political engagement than the

act of voting. However, while this may sound counterintuitive at first, we define democracy

“thinly,” in procedural terms, as an institutional arrangement in which leaders acquire control

over government through a competitive, electoral process.

We provocatively adopt this latter definition because our argument and findings suggest

that participatory and representative democracy are not, as some assume, necessarily in tension.

Indeed, participation and representation can complement each other; we aim to demonstrate

precisely what has frustrated both advocates and critics of participatory democracy: that

participatory practices can deepen actually existing democratic regimes by opening the doors for

extensive civil society influence over national governance. To date, research on participatory

practices has focused on the impact of participation in “minipublics” (Fung 2003), small-scale

and/or local practices. We provide the first evidence that participatory governance practices can,

through a process that does involve representation and delegation, be both scaled up to the

national level and that shape important outcomes at the “macro” democracy level. This finding

undermines the most obvious objection to the significance of participatory practices: that they

are impractical and thus unimportant to the functioning of democracy.

Two Critiques of Participatory Democracy

Pateman offered two explanations for why scholars continue to pay relatively little

attention to the relationship between participation and democracy - one normative, and one

practical. First, from ancient times through the advent of modern representative government,

many have associated mass participation with political instability. Mainstream 20th

-century

democratic theory emerged in the shadow of the collapse of Weimar Germany - a country

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thought to have a participatory culture (Berman 1997) - and during an era of extreme pessimism

about democracy’s future, as totalitarianism based on mass mobilization threatened democracies

from both left and right. Participation was seen as dysfunctional for democracy.

Joseph Schumpeter (1942) formulated his “realist” definition of democracy in this

context, reducing democracy to a procedure in which elites compete for citizens’ votes. Distilling

centuries of disdain for popular participation, Schumpeter suggested that “The electoral mass is

incapable of action other than a stampede” (283), echoing Nietzsche’s view that mass suffrage

was an expression of “herd instinct” (quoted in Hirschman 1991, 22). Nevertheless,

Schumpeter’s has become the default starting point for defining modern representative

democracy, described alternatively (whether approvingly or not) as “elitist” (Pateman 1970) or

“minimalist” (Przeworski 2010). To be sure, Dahl (1956; 1971) added details to this procedural

definition, but his own pluralist notion of democracy still offered scant space to participation

beyond voting and rights to free speech and association – and he even resurrected the

participation bugbear by explicitly suggesting that lower-class mobilization could destabilize

democracy (1956, 89).

Huntington (1968) reinvigorated the normative critique of participation in his broader

attack on modernization theory. However, in recent years normative arguments against

participation have grown ambivalent and conceptually ambiguous. On the one hand, Huntington

again tied participation to radicalization (and by extension to authoritarian reaction) in his The

Third Wave (1993, 169-171). This view became consensual among mainstream scholars of

democratization, even if only implicitly (e.g. Schmitter and Karl 1991; see especially Bermeo

1997). On the other hand, other scholars sought to turn the normative argument against

participation on its head. For example, Powell (1982) revealed that voter turnout and political

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instability were negatively correlated. Similarly, Putnam (1993) reinvigorated Tocqueville’s

notion that a participatory “civic” culture could sustain democracy. Putnam’s work launched an

avalanche of research that saw participation as a panacea for democracies’ ills. However,

confidence in his argument was undermined by powerful critiques (e.g. Levi 1996; Tarrow 1996;

Newton 1997; Berman 1997).

The focus on “civic culture” also exposed a tension in the literature on new democracies:

most scholars grudgingly accepted the “procedural” definition of democracy, yet at the same

time they lamented the lack of democratic deepening or “consolidation,” a concept that demands

much more of democracy than procedural minimalism. Scholars disparaged new democracies as

“delegative” (O’Donnell 1994) or constitutionally “illiberal” (Zakaria 1997; Levitsky and Way

2002) - the antithesis of Barber’s (1984) “strong” democracy in many ways, for example - and

pessimistically concluded that while transitions had played out among elites, consolidation was

unlikely to play out among the masses (e.g. Diamond 1999, 171; Carothers 2002).

Much like critiques of Putnam’s “civic culture” argument, critiques of the concept of

consolidation left scholars unsure of its meaning or importance (Przeworski et al. 1996;

O’Donnell 1996; Schedler 2001). In turn, this left the importance of political participation to the

fate of new democratic regimes unclear. Although some scholars argue that a lack of mass

participation (whether in terms of voting turnout, engagement in social movements, or otherwise)

might weaken democracy, no consensus exists about whether a participatory culture can bring

about or sustain democracy (Sabetti 2007). In short, skepticism has replaced pessimism about the

relationship between participation and democracy.

The second objection to participation is practical rather than normative – quite simply,

that it is “unrealistic” to expect participation to matter for democratic performance. Modern

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democracy is necessarily representative democracy, so the argument goes, because modern

polities are simply too big to allow mass participation in the process of government. Somewhat

bizarrely, the normative and practical objections to participation are in tension. After all, if

participation can affect regime stability, than obviously its practical importance is not in question

– and no one has ever defined the difference between “bad” and “irrelevant” participation. What

the latter claim boils down to is the alleged irrelevance of small-scale participatory practices, as

compared against the danger of mass mobilization in a context of intense political polarization.1

In terms of its alleged irrelevance, Sartori (1987) suggests that participation is impossible

if one takes the meaning of “self-government” literally. If participation is “taking part in person,

a self-activated willed taking part,” (113) then it “can hardly be denied…that taking part is

meaningful, authentic and real only within the ambit of small groups” (114), with a maximum

size of a few thousand (111) (i.e., the size of the Athenian assembly). Przeworski (2010) concurs,

echoing Sartori in assuming that only the few can have causal efficacy on the exercise of

government in a large modern polity, via election or by buying influence (110). Because equality

and effectiveness are incompatible, “the program of ‘participatory democracy,” he concludes

“…is not feasible at the national scale” (110).

Przeworski highlights the key challenge confronting Pateman’s lament about the place of

participatory democracy in political science, suggesting that participation is only meaningful if it

has causal impact on the exercise of government (110). And such efficacy, he suggests, is

impossible. Using the logic of social choice theory, he reasons that since collective decisions

under democracy are made by majority rule elections in which all adults have equal formal

influence, only the decisive voter can have a direct causal effect on the outcome. It is not only the

1 Debate about deliberation has paralleled debate about participation: just as critics suggested participation might

destabilize democracy, critics have suggested that deliberation can harden political differences rather than promote a

broader understanding of the common good (e.g. Mutz 2006).

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election’s losers who have no effect; all other voters have zero causal efficacy since their

decisions do not affect the outcome. Citing Isaiah Berlin (2002, 49), Przeworski suggests that

only a unanimous-consent rule gives causal efficacy to individual participation.

This understanding of “causal efficacy” under democracy is too narrow. First, it pretends

that even electoral, minimalist democracy is a one-shot game rather than a process in which

winners become losers and vice versa, and in which losing arguments one day gradually gain

adherents and eventually win out over formerly dominant views – or vice versa. It also precludes

the possibility that even those who lose a majority vote have causally influenced the outcome

through complaint, debate, negotiation, or even threats to disobey eventual collective decisions.

Even within the minimalist paradigm, individual causal efficacy is not logically predicated on

unanimity. Przeworski’s approach excludes all but the most proximal of causes from having

causal efficacy, but few social scientists interested in causal explanations accept such a narrow

definition of causality. Some actions have proximal and some have distal effects on the exercise

of government; determining which do which do not is an empirical question.

Przeworski’s claim is ontologically restrictive. Yet advocates for participatory democracy

appear to have implicitly accepted the “realist” critique that participatory practices lack even a

distal effect on national democratic performance. This is because research on participatory

practices has focused on local-level, small-scale participation, what Fung (2003) calls “mini-

publics.” Despite Pateman’s lament, the attention to such practices is impressive, given the small

numbers of citizens typically involved - a few dozen in German citizen juries; a few hundred in

Canadian citizen assemblies; a few thousand in municipal participatory budgeting processes in

Brazil, for example - and also given the narrow impact of such practices’ on public policy.

Pateman, for example, gushes over the facts that “tens of thousands” (2012, 11) have participated

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in participatory budgeting in Brazil, yet she also concedes that mini-publics offer no evidence

that participation improves democratic performance at the national level, and even acknowledged

the realist critique that the potential for participatory practices to “democratize democracy”

might be a utopian fantasy (1970, 44, 110).

In a review of recent research on representation in democratic theory, Urbinati and

Warren (2008) appear to agree that participatory practices may never satisfy critics who have

long suggested that the “flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a

strong upper-class accent” (Schattschneider 1960, 35). While acknowledging that new

participatory practices can “capture voices and opinions that typically go unheard,” the authors

(406) acknowledge that because the number of citizens who actively engage in participatory

governance practices is so infinitesimal relative to the national population, such practices

inevitably embody not participation but a form of republican representation in that the few

(informally) represent the many. Here we see why Pateman continues to worry about the place of

participation in democratic theory – even some of its renowned advocates seem not to be sure

whether participation can be more than a minor adjunct to “minimalist” democracy.

Participation and Minimalist Democracy

Despite the boom in research, skepticism from within and without weakens intellectual

and political support for the notion that participation can deepen democracy. We seek to provide

a basis for revisiting such skepticism. To do so we set the bar high, asking whether participation

can shape the core relationship between state and society in a democracy, even if we define

democracy in a “minimalist” way.

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In the Schumpeterian, minimalist framework, elites win elections to exercise control over

government. As Bobbio (1989) explained, this definition implies that the fundamental difference

between democracy and autocracy is that in the former, universal suffrage authorizes coercion.

This further implies that under democracy, elections serve the salutary normative purpose of

minimizing the use of violence for political ends (Przeworski 1999). And given this, the purpose

of democratic theory therefore should be to seek out ways to ensure that politics minimizes the

illegitimate use of force (Shapiro 2003, 35).

In this vein, and echoing themes found in Machiavelli and Madison, Sartori suggests that

participation is meaningful if it helps limit state domination over society (161-2). Similarly,

echoing Rousseau yet contradicting his narrow definition of causal efficacy, Przeworski (2010,

109) approvingly cites Hans Kelsen’s (1949, 284) more expansive notion of democracy as a

process in which individual freedom and liberty derive from participating in the creation of the

political world, rather than by passive consent.

In short, if one accepts Bobbio’s insight about the normative aim of “minimalist”

democracy, then the gap between “thin” and “thick” definitions of democracy narrows - if not

completely, then sufficiently so to wonder whether there is more room for participation in the

former. The question remains, however, whether participatory governance practices can serve

Kelsen’s and Shapiro’s purpose in practice. The key to answering this question is to show that

substantive participation - personal, self-motivated engagement in participatory practices – can

have causal efficacy on the exercise of governance at the national level.

It is important to underline the extent to which both advocates and critics agree that this is

the critical test for a participatory conception of democracy - not whether or not it has the effect

of educating individuals or transforming their preferences and views of politics. It may have this

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effect, but the crucial question is participation’s causal efficacy on the exercise of power.

Observers assume such an effect is impossible, and the absence of observable “macro”

participatory processes that put the hypothesis to the test has left the skeptics in control of the

discussion. Until recently, no country in the world had implemented national-level participatory

governance programs, in which large-scale, uncoerced and active participation shapes national-

level policies. This is what Brazil’s National Public Policy Conferences accomplish. In the next

section we describe how they do so, and illustrate the ways in which they shape the exercise of

government power - helping to limit domination, even if they could never completely prevent it.

Brazil’s National Public Policy Conferences

Pateman lavished attention on Brazil’s innovative participatory governance experiments

in her APSA presidential address. The best known of these is “participatory budgeting” (PB) first

implemented in 1989 in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. Numerous cities in Brazil

and elsewhere have later implemented this process, in which citizens help decide the allocation

of a portion of local capital expenditures. Pateman’s speech summarized scholars’ findings that

PB has increased local participation and diversified the distribution of infrastructure investments

(e.g. Santos 1998; Baiocchi 2005; Wampler 2007; Avritzer 2009).

PB is but one of several efforts to democratize and decentralize Brazilian politics since

the country emerged from two decades of military rule in the 1980s. During the regime

transition, civil society organizations (CSOs) played an important role in pushing for greater

inclusiveness in policy-making, and successfully inserted several participatory mechanisms into

Brazil’s 1988 “citizen constitution” (Avritzer 2006). Many of these processes continue to operate

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successfully, including municipal, state and national-level councils that address a wide variety of

policies (see e.g. Donaghy 2009; Abers and Keck 2009).

No matter how widespread their use, these participatory governance practices have had

limited impact on the overall quality of Brazilian democracy because of their small scale and

local scope. However, since the enactment of the 1988 Constitution, and especially since the

ascension of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) to power in 2003, Brazil has

also reinvigorated and expanded a decades-old national-level participatory process, the National

Public Policy Conferences (Pogrebinschi 2010a, 2010b and 2012b; Pogrebinschi and Santos

2011). NPPCs have gone largely unnoticed as yet by the international academic and policy

community - but this situation is unlikely to last, as they provide an unprecedented opportunity

for grassroots participation in the design of important national policies. In this section we

describe the origins of the NPPCs, and highlight their key features: the joint state-society

governance of the NPPC process, their openness to grass-roots participation, their policy scope,

and their scale in terms of number of participants. The next two sections will describe how their

open design facilitates citizen input into the formulation and implementation of national

policies.2

Origins

The NPPCs are not technically an innovation in terms of participatory governance

practices. Ironically, they were created during the autocratic reign of President Getúlio Vargas’

(1930-45) (Law 378 of 1937), to help federal government bureaucrats learn about the nature of

public-health problems across the country. The first national conference was held in 1941, and

2 The material that follows relies on Pogrebinschi (2010a), Pogrebinschi (2010b), Pogrebinschi and Santos (2010),

Pogrebinschi and Santos (2011), Pogrebinschi (2012a) and Pogrebinschi (2012b).

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focused on health care. The 1937 law gave the president the authority to convoke conferences,

and requires all conferences to include representatives from all three levels of Brazilian

government - national, state and municipal - as well as representatives from relevant CSOs. This

main process remains in place to this day, however significantly improved in the past years.

The creation of the NPPC process is unusual in several respects: it does not embody the

sort of governance practices commonly associated with autocracy nor populism, and does not fit

comfortably within the top-down corporatist understandings of governance that numerous

scholars have suggested characterize this era, both in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America (e.g.

Schmitter 1971; Collier and Collier 1991). In fact, the creation of the NPPCs on public-health

issues is owed to the early 20th

-century “bottom-up” influence of Brazil’s sanitary-health

movement (on which, see e.g. Santos 1985 or Hochmann 1993). Also of note at this point is that

NPPCs on health care were held under both democratic (1950 and 1963) and autocratic (1941,

1967, 1975, 1977, and 1980) auspices, and that the NPPC process predates the founding of the

PT in 1980. The PT did not create the NPPCs, although the conferences certainly embody

longstanding PT principles (Pogrebinschi 2012c). The important point is that joint state-society

influence characterized the origins of Brazil’s NPPCs.

Process

Joint state-society influence also characterizes the process through which NPPCs work.

Formally, NPPCs are summoned by presidential or ministerial decree. However, the catalyst for

any conference typically comes from the joint mobilization of government officials and key CSO

representatives, particularly from joint state/society advisory councils within national-level

government ministries. An example is the National Council of Women’s Rights (Conselho

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Nacional dos Direitos da Mulher, CNDM), created in 1985 within the Ministry of Justice, and

now residing within the National Secretariat for Women’s Policies (SNPM). The CNDM has 16

members from different government ministries, 14 members from feminist and women’s-rights

groups, and seven members from other CSOs that work on issues germane to gender policy, such

as certain unions.3

An example illustrates how the joint NPPC process works: Following the issuance of a

presidential decree, in July 2006 the CNDM along with the SNPM began organizing the 2nd

NPPC on women’s rights, to be held the following year. It first created an organizing committee,

composed of four CSO representatives and four officials from the Secretariat, including the

minister herself. The committee set the dates for the municipal, state and national meetings,

adjusted the NPPC’s internal rules of order, and determined that the conference agenda would

focus on evaluating the first two years of the implementation of the government’s “National Plan

for Women’s Policies” and discussing ways to increase women’s influence in politics.4 This

organizational process is then repeated at the state and municipal levels, before the conferences

begin, so that local concerns from across Brazil can be incorporated into the deliberations. The

national ministries and relevant state and local government secretariats provide funds for the

preparations and the meetings.

With minor variations, all conferences follow this overall process. The actual conferences

begin at the municipal level, with meetings in hundreds or even thousands of cities held

simultaneously across the country.5 It is here that the participatory nature of the NPPCs truly

becomes apparent, as municipal-level conferences are open to anyone. The government

3 For information on the Secretariat and its membership, see http://www.sepm.gov.br, accessed 5/1/12.

4 For information on the composition of the organizing committee and the agenda, see

http://www4.planalto.gov.br/spmulheres/mulheres-em-pauta/boletins-do-anos-anteriores/boletim-mulheres-em-

pauta-ano-iii-no-19, accessed 5/1/12. 5 Sometimes a group of municipalities bands together and holds what is called a “regional” conference.

http://www.sepm.gov.br/

http://www4.planalto.gov.br/spmulheres/mulheres-em-pauta/boletins-do-anos-anteriores/boletim-mulheres-em-pauta-ano-iii-no-19

http://www4.planalto.gov.br/spmulheres/mulheres-em-pauta/boletins-do-anos-anteriores/boletim-mulheres-em-pauta-ano-iii-no-19

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advertises their dates and locations, and CSOs spread the word. The broad agenda structures the

deliberations, and each municipal conference is charged with producing a final report, which

typically contains dozens or even hundreds of policy recommendations, and which is voted on in

a final plenary session. Each municipal conference then elects delegates to one of 27 state-level

conferences; anyone who shows up to a municipal meeting has the right to voice and vote on the

policy proposals and the election of delegates - and anyone who shows up can potentially be

elected as a delegate.

The process then shifts to the state level. These meetings are not fully open, but both the

state and national meetings maintain the principle of joint state-society collaboration. At both the

state and national levels, rules typically require a majority of voting delegates come from CSOs

and/or from representatives of front-line, local-level government employees.6 At the state level

meeting participation begins to be transformed into representation, as the delegates elected from

the municipal conferences join representatives of relevant state-government agencies to repeat

the deliberative process, discussing and systematizing the policy recommendations that emerged

from the municipal meetings. Each state meeting produces a final report that lists every proposal

approved in the meeting’s concluding plenary session, and then elects delegates to the national-

level meeting. Just as with the municipal and state-level conferences, before the national meeting

a mixed state-society commission systematizes the proposals from all the state reports; the

national meeting then deliberates and votes on the set of proposals, resulting in a single, final

report containing national-level policy recommendations.

6 In some cases, CSOs organize separate “free” conferences that are not tied to the municipal or state-level

conferences. As long as certain procedures are followed, the policy proposals emerging from these conferences are

included in national-level conference deliberations. Likewise, on-line “virtual” conferences are held to facilitate

participation by those who cannot attend a face-to-face meeting. As with the free conferences, results of virtual

conferences are in most cases included in national deliberations.

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The goal of the process is to provide elected officials with information about priorities for

amending existing or formulating new national policies. The openness at the grassroots and joint

state-society collaboration makes the NPPC process distinctive in terms of ways to formulate

national policies: It is not technocratic in that it does not suppose that experts know best; it

minimizes lobbyists’ influence because deliberations are open to the public, all participants have

in principle an equal vote at the municipal level and CSO representatives and/or front-line

workers’ representatives tend to outnumber government authorities at each stage; and it is not

corporatist, as the government does not determine who gets to sit at the table and only

determines the agenda jointly with a rotating set of CSO leaders - and even then, only in very

general and not substantive terms.

This process is designed to ensure that a diverse set of voices from across the entire

country is heard, from the local up to the national level. This is the last and crucial way that the

NPPCs differ from other participatory mechanisms – the possibility that participation at the grass

roots can result in not just the assertion of new policy claims but in actual new policy output

(Pogrebinschi and Santos 2010 and 2011). In short, the NPPC process represents a dramatic

break from state-led, elitist and “delegative” methods of democratic governance.

Scope

The 1937 law mandated semi-annual state-society collaboration in both health and

education policy, yet over the next five decades only 14 National Conferences were held, all

except one on health care. Since 1992, however, NPPCs have occurred more frequently and have

come to encompass a much broader range of policies. Table 1 lists the 83 National Conferences

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held from 1992-2010.7 Only two conferences were held under President Fernando Collor (1989-

92), and only six under his successor Itamar Franco (1992-94), all related to healthcare. President

Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002) convoked 17 conferences, seven on healthcare issues

and seven on human rights and only three on different issues.

Table 1 Here

During Luis Inácio Lula da Silva’s presidency (2003-2010), NPPCs were convoked on a

far wider range of policies. Lula convoked 74 conferences (although only 58 can be considered

fully deliberative in the sense described by Pogrebinschi 2010a and Pogrebinschi and Santos

2010 and 2011), expanding the topics to include urban development and the environment;

marginalized populations such as Afro-Brazilians, women, and the LGBT community;

education; sports; and culture. This expansion of participatory opportunities reflected his and his

party’s longstanding connection to organized civil society (Keck 1992; Hunter 2010) as well as

the PT’s goal of “deepening” Brazilian democracy through participation (Samuels 2012). Lula’s

successor Dilma Rousseff has continued the pace of NPPCs, and has also expanded their scope

into additional areas (Pogrebinschi 2012c).8

Scale

Since 1994 - but especially since 2003 - Brazil has opened new spaces for grass-roots

participation in the shaping of important national policies. However, the number of NPPCs does

not adequately convey their size, in terms of number of participants. Both the scope and scale of

7 This number excludes 12 conferences that did not include a deliberative process that allowed for grass-roots input;

See Pogrebinschi and Santos (2011) for more details. Source for this table: Adapted from Pogrebinschi (2010a) and

(2012b). 8 A complete list of conferences can be found at http://www.secretariageral.gov.br/.arquivos/arquivos-

novos/CONFERENCIAS%20NACIONAIS__Tabela_1941_%202010_26abril2010.pdf. For current and scheduled

conferences, see http://www.secretariageral.gov.br/art_social/conferencias-nacionais-2011-2012, accessed 4/30/12.

http://www.secretariageral.gov.br/.arquivos/arquivos-novos/CONFERENCIAS%20NACIONAIS__Tabela_1941_%202010_26abril2010.pdf

http://www.secretariageral.gov.br/.arquivos/arquivos-novos/CONFERENCIAS%20NACIONAIS__Tabela_1941_%202010_26abril2010.pdf

http://www.secretariageral.gov.br/art_social/conferencias-nacionais-2011-2012

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Brazil’s NPPCs - and not just their openness – particularly differentiate the NPPCs from other

experiments in participatory democracy.

The scale of participation in Brazil’s national conferences makes every other experiment

in participatory democracy look quite small. Each conference, from the local to the national

level, can involve hundreds of thousands of people - and in total, about seven million people

participated in one of the 82 conferences held between 2003 and 2011 - about 5% of the

country’s adult population.9 Given that one can hardly expect most people who are intensely

interested in a particular policy to have the time and interest to actually attend a national

conference process, this is a truly remarkable level of popular participation in the policy process.

The number of conference participants does vary considerably. For example, over

600,000 participated in the 14th

National Conference on Health in 2011, perhaps the largest thus

far, while about 400,000 participated in the 8th

National Conference on Social Assistance, and

about 525,000 in the 1st National Conference on Public Security.

10 Some conferences have far

fewer participants – for example, “only” 70,000 participated in the 3rd

National Conference on

Rights of the Elderly in 2011.

A few details illustrate how the participatory process is scaled up (for extensive details

see Pogrebinschi 2012d). For example, about 200,000 people participated in 2,160 municipal-

level meetings held for the 3rd

National Conference on Women’s Policy in 2011. In the state of

Rio de Janeiro, 7,915 people participated in the municipal meetings, which were held in 52 of the

state’s 92 municipalities. Although the numbers attending any single municipal-level meeting

9 Em Questão (Brasília) 1444 (January 9, 2012). http://www.secom.gov.br/sobre-a-secom/nucleo-de-comunicacao-

publica/copy_of_em-questao-1/edicoes-anteriores/em-questao-pdf-1/2012-janeiro/em-questao-1444-dia-9-segunda-

feira. Accessed 4/30/12. 10

In this latter case and in some others, this number includes participation in “free” and “virtual” conferences. Free

conferences maintain the participatory spirit of the process, but are mostly organized by CSOs rather than local

governments; anyone is welcome to participate. Virtual conferences compile contributions submitted online to a

dedicated website. At the national level, policy proposals from both free and virtual conferences are systematized

and deliberated together with those emanating from municipal and state conferences.

http://www.secom.gov.br/sobre-a-secom/nucleo-de-comunicacao-publica/copy_of_em-questao-1/edicoes-anteriores/em-questao-pdf-1/2012-janeiro/em-questao-1444-dia-9-segunda-feira



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may be relatively small, the picture to hold in one’s mind is of literally hundreds and sometimes

thousands of such meetings being held simultaneously around the country, deliberating on the

same issues. The NPPCs are clearly in a different league as far as participatory democracy is

concerned: they are by far the world’s largest experiment with such practices in terms of number

of participants, policy scope, and potential impact, and their success demonstrates that large-

scale participation at the national level is both salutary and feasible for macro-democracy.

Millions of average Brazilians have participated, and their efforts have shaped policies relevant

to millions more. It is to this question – the NPPCs’ impact - that we now turn.

Assessing the Impact of Brazil’s NPPCs

Existing research suggests that participatory governance mechanisms can serve as a way

for citizens to ensure policy responsiveness and to hold officials accountable, through the normal

channels of democratic governance: groups of citizens present demands, and government

officials agree to act in response (e.g. Avritzer 2002; Fung and Wright 2003). Because this

research has mostly focused on local participatory processes, such positive assessments of

participatory practices are frequently coupled with advocacy of greater policy decentralization,

because consensus opinion suggests that decentralization promotes responsiveness and

accountability to popular demands (e.g. Baiocchi 2003; Goldfrank 2007; Donaghy 2009; more

broadly, see Bardan and Mookerjee 2006). The more decentralized the polity, so the idea goes,

the greater the possibilities for popular engagement in politics.

It is certainly possible that decentralization promotes more responsive and accountable

government. Yet no matter how intense the pressures for decentralization or for popular

participation, centralized government control over most areas of policy-making will remain the

19

dominant truth about politics. Some advocates of participatory governance practices might take

this as a reason for despair, but we take it as an indication of how imperative it is to investigate

the possibility participation could be “scaled up” to the national level, and shape national-level

policy outcomes.

We adopt two strategies to demonstrate the impact of NPPCs on national-level policy

production in Brazil: quantitative and qualitative. Both connect the policy proposals that

originate in the NPPC process to new national-level policy proposals and actual policies. The

quantitative approach matches proposals to policies over time, and counts them, to simply

establish how many NPPC proposals end up as actual public policy. Although this approach

confirms our main claim, it is also a “thin” account of NPPCs’ importance, because several new

statutes make only minor alterations to pre-existing laws or do not introduce new relevant

policies. Even if all new statutes in a particular policy area could be traced to NPPC proposals,

we would have no way to know whether they substantively impacted citizens’ lives or not.

Hence the need for a second, “thicker” qualitative approach, which details how substantively

important proposals that originate in NPPCs are incorporated into national legislation. The

combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches offers convincing evidence that

participation can be scaled up and that it can impact important national policy - that participation

can “deepen” the practice of democracy on a “macro” scale.

Quantitative Assessment

Our claim is simple: the NPPC process can be a source of new national-level policies.

We do not claim that all - or even most - new policy in a particular area will emerge from NPPC

deliberations, nor do we claim that all NPPC recommendations will become law. We only

20

suggest that NPPCs can and do contribute to the creation of new national policies. Let us now

explain how we connect NPPC policy recommendations to actual new policies. Simplifying

greatly, we took lists of all NPPC proposals in particular policy areas and sought to match them

against lists of policy proposals and enacted legislation in the same policy area. To establish a

baseline for comparison, we gathered federal policy proposals in relevant policy areas between

1990 and 2010, independently of when the first NPPC was held in that area. (We describe our

search process in more detail below.)

Because the process of matching NPPC proposals to policies is extremely labor-intensive,

we selected three of the 36 conference themes from Table 1 for analysis: Public Policies for

Women (which focuses on fostering social, economic, cultural and political gender equality);

Food and Nutritional Security (which focuses on questions of government provision of access to

adequate food for Brazil’s poorest citizens); and Social Assistance (which deals with issues

relevant to social workers as professionals, as well as the issue of citizens’ access to and

government support for social-welfare programs).

We chose these three themes for two reasons. First, although NPPCs on Policies for

Women were held only during Lula’s administration (in 2004 and 2007), the other two themes

are among the few outside of healthcare that also held conferences during Fernando Henrique

Cardoso’s two terms (1995-2002). It is crucial to explore the impact of NPPCs under both

Cardoso and Lula, given the assumption that in Brazil, participatory mechanisms only function

well when the PT is in power (e.g. Baiocchi et al 2005, Wampler 2007, Avritzer 2009). To the

extent that we can show that NPPCs contributed to policy under both Cardoso and Lula, we gain

support for our argument.

21

Second, these themes represent not just three distinct types of policies, but policies with

very different constituencies and levels of support from organized civil society. Our intent is to

show that the NPPC process can influence policy across a range of public policy themes – from

those widely supported, to those that only appeal to a narrow slice of Brazil’s population. For

example, the first theme focuses on questions relevant to the rights of a historically under-

represented group – but that group constitutes half of Brazil’s population. Moreover, Brazil’s

feminist movement has historically been well organized and its membership has historically been

predominantly upper-middle class (e.g. Alvarez 1990). In contrast, although Food and

Nutritional Security is also a longstanding theme in Brazilian public policy (see the ‘qualitative’

section below), the theme entails a narrower policy focus, requires the investment of large sums

of government resources for policy success, and is focused on the needs of Brazil’s poorest

citizens - i.e. those with extremely little political influence. Finally, while conferences on Social

Assistance are also relevant to questions of access to government services for a needy Brazilians,

they are also focused on the regulation of a set of related “helping” professions.

Let us now describe more specifically how we matched NPPC proposals to policies. We

started with the proposals contained in NPPCs’ final reports, which are published after a

national-level conference concludes. These final reports can be quite lengthy, as they contain a

summary of the conference’s deliberations as well as the full text of all proposals the conference

approves. Proposals can be vague or specific. For example, in the Final Report of the 3rd

National Conference on Food and Nutritional Security, one proposal suggests “adopting the

‘solidary economy’ as a political strategy of national development and of promotion of food and

nutritional security” (p. 27), while another suggesting “implementing Inter-Ministerial Order

22

#1.010/2006, regarding formulation of adequate menus for schoolchildren and for diversification

of school nutrition programs” (p. 33).11

Others are even more specific.

From these final reports, we created a database of all proposals from the conferences held

on the themes we chose to analyze. We sought to “match” these proposals to subsequent

proposed and/or promulgated new policies, which can take one of the following four forms:

Constitutional Amendments: Brazil amended its 1988 constitution 67 times between 1990

and 2010, an average of about three times per year.

Complementary Laws: statutes that specifically elaborate on broader guidelines in Brazil’s

constitution. Complementary laws demand an absolute majority in Congress for passage.

Only three Complementary Laws were enacted on average per year between 1990 and 2010.

Ordinary Laws: normal legislation. An average of 198 were enacted per year between 1990

and 2010, across all policy areas. These require only a simple majority for passage.

Presidential Decrees: manage the organization and functions of the federal-government

administration. National Policy Programs and Plans are usually enacted through a

Presidential Decree. Presidents can issue them at will as long as no expenses are involved or

government organizations are created or eliminated. (In this way they are similar to

“executive orders” in the United States.)12

To determine the extent to which NPPC deliberations were substantively incorporated

into proposed and enacted policies, we had to generate a much larger database of all proposed

and enacted policies that were potentially germane to the conference themes. After all, many

11

See Conselho Nacional de Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional (2007), “III Conferência Nacional de Segurança

Alimentar e Nutricional: Relatório Final.” Available at http://www4.planalto.gov.br/consea/as-conferencias,

accessed July 30, 2012. 12

These are not the better-known “provisionary measures” (medidas provisórias, MPs), which we do not include

because according to Brazil’s constitution presidents can only issue MPs in certain policy areas, and also because a

constitutional amendment in 2001 dramatically restricted presidents’ ability to issue MPs. For both reasons we

cannot compare the issuance of MPs either across policy areas or over time.

http://www4.planalto.gov.br/consea/as-conferencias

23

several NPPC proposals are never incorporated into subsequent policy - and many policies that

are proposed and/or passed cannot be said to owe their origins to NPPC deliberations. (Overall,

Pogrebinschi and Santos (2011, 284) found that about 26% of all NPPC proposals - across all

NPPC themes - were incorporated into some sort of policy proposal.) To determine how many

NPPC proposals ended up as policy proposals and/or enacted legislation, we conducted

keyword-based searches in the public on-line databases of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies13

(for

ordinary and complementary laws and constitutional amendments) and Brazil’s Presidency (for

presidential decrees).14

To create the lists of proposals and enacted statutes germane to each

conference theme, we searched these databases with keywords derived from each NPPC’s main

themes. These were:

For Public Policies for Women: “women” (mulheres), “gender” (gênero), “reproductive

rights” (direitos reprodutivos) and “domestic violence” (violência doméstica)

For Social Assistance: “social assistance” (assistência social), “social service” (serviço

social), “social protection” (proteção social), and “benefits” (benefícios)

For Food and Nutritional Security: “food security” (segurança alimentar), “nutrition”

(nutrição), nourishment (alimentação), agricultural policy (políticas agrícolas), and

provision (abastecimento).

We then sought to match each NPPC proposal to the policies. A team of research

assistants considered every NPPC proposal individually, checking to see whether it was

substantively congruent or not with the intent of any subsequent policy proposal or promulgated

law, constitutional amendment or decree. At this point we can provide results of our searches.

Figure 1 illustrates the ebb and flow of legislative proposals related to women’s policies between

13

See http://www.camara.gov.br/sileg/default.asp 14

See http://www4.planalto.gov.br/legislacao

http://www.camara.gov.br/sileg/default.asp

http://www4.planalto.gov.br/legislacao

24

1990 and 2010. The dotted line reveals that an average of about 28 new policies are proposed

each year - and that since the advent of the NPPC on women’s policies in 2004, about seven of

those have been congruent with NPPC proposals (there were about 30 proposals per year after

2004, when the first National Conference on Policy for Women was held).

Figures 1-3 Here

Figure 2 turns to the key question of enacted legislation - constitutional amendments,

complementary and ordinary laws. On average, 3.1 new statutes were enacted per year between

1990 and 2010 on women’s issues. Between 2004 and 2010 the average was 3.0 - but over half

of those, an average of 1.6 statutes per year, were congruent with NPPC proposals. Figure 3

considers presidential decrees. On average since 2004, the president issued about three decrees

per year germane to women’s policy issues - and about one can be traced to the substantive

intent of an NPPC proposal. Overall, although the advent of NPPCs on women’s policy in 2004

did not increase the “level” of policy output, NPPC deliberations have clearly played a

substantial role in the production of new public policies for women, and therefore in setting the

policy agenda . To illustrate, Table 2 lists examples of statutes that were fruit of NPPC

deliberations on women’s issues.

Table 2 Here

While the last two statutes apply to a narrow subset of all women, and the third statue

cannot be said to have great importance, the first two instituted momentous changes. Prior to

2004 no category of “domestic violence” existed in Brazilian law; men enjoyed considerable

legal impunity. The “Maria da Penha” law (so named because of a decades-long battle to

prosecute a man who shot his wife, leaving her a paraplegic) is a major piece of legislation, and

many of its elements were contained in the 2004 women’s policy NPPC final deliberations.

25

Among the law’s many innovations, it created special courts and imposed longer sentences for

domestic violence, and created special shelters for women fleeing abusive relationships (Brazil,

Special Secretariat for Women’s Policies, 2006). And in the five years since the law’s passage,

Brazil counted 331,000 prosecutions for domestic violence.15

NPPCs had less impact, in relative terms, on the production of policy related to Social

Assistance. Overall, as Figure 4 reveals, between 1990 and 2010 an average of about 26 new

proposals came before Congress in this policy area, about 5.3 of which were congruent with

recommendations from NPPCs. In terms of enacted legislation, the data reported in Figure 5

indicate that only 40 total new laws on this topic were passed between 1990 and 2010, and of

these only three are congruent with NPPC final deliberations - much less influence than for

women’s policies. Figure 6 shows a similar pattern for presidential decrees - about 10.7 decrees

were issued per year since the first NPPC on Social Assistance in 1994, about 1.3 of which were

congruent with NPPC recommendations. Table 3 describes a few of the laws dealing with “social

assistance” that emerged from NPPC deliberations.

Figures 4-6 Here

Table 3 Here

A different situation emerges when we consider NPPCs’ impact on policy related to Food

and Nutritional Security. First, Figure 7 shows that on average about 20 new relevant proposals

came before Congress since the 1st NPPC on this topic in 1994, and about 9 of those were

congruent with recommendations from NPPCs. Likewise, Figure 8 shows that in terms of actual

policies produced, about 1.5 of the 5.2 total new policies on average were congruent with NPPC

proposals - almost 30%. Finally, Figure 9 details the contribution of NPPCs to the production of

15

See “Maria da Penha Law: A Name that Changed Society,” accessed at

http://www.unwomen.org/2011/08/espanol-ley-maria-da-penha/, July 11, 2012.

http://www.unwomen.org/2011/08/espanol-ley-maria-da-penha/

26

presidential decrees in this policy realm, indicating that about six were issued per year, of which

about two were congruent with NPPC proposals. Table 4 provides examples the sorts of policies

that emerge from NPPC deliberations on this topic.

Figures 7-9 Here

Table 4 Here

In sum, a quantitative assessment confirms our fundamental point: deliberations in and

recommendations from Brazil’s National Public Policy Conferences can and do provide the

source of important new national-level policies. Quantitatively at least, input from NPPCs is

responsible for a substantial proportion of all new statutes in two of the three policy themes we

considered. The quantitative analysis also confirms that NPPCs contributed to policy production

under both Cardoso and Lula - that is, their impact does not depend on the PT holding power.

These three policy areas themes accounted for about 10 new statutes per year, looking at

constitutional amendments, complementary laws, and ordinary laws - about three of which were

congruent with proposals contained in NPPC final reports. Brazil produces about 200 total new

statutes per year. Our research only considered 3 of the 36 NPPC themes (until 2010), suggesting

that had we considered all of the NPPC themes, we would likely find dozens more new policies

per year with roots in NPPC deliberations. It is also important to take into account the fact that

many new statutes issued by the Legislature pertain to topics that NPPCs do not cover, such as

taxation and business regulations, international trade and finance, national defense, and the

economy. This reduces the “denominator” measuring the potential influence of the NPPC

process, and suggests that participation can have a wide-ranging and large impact on the

production of national policy in contemporary Brazil. In short, NPPCs have become credible

27

institutions for channeling interests - particularly from historically under-represented groups such

as women - to elected and appointed government officials.16

Qualitative Assessment

The raw number of statutes that emerge from participatory processes leaves many

questions about NPPC’s impact unanswered. Most importantly, can we be sure that participation

not only has an impact on policy creation – but participation via the NPPC process contributes to

the creation of substantively important new policies? To what extent are statutes introduced by

the NPPCs really innovative? Do they address crucial issues, and substantively alter Brazil’s

political agenda? In order to address these questions, we move now to a qualitative assessment of

NPPCs’ impact. Given space constraints, our appraisal will take a closer look at one of the three

policy areas analyzed above, Food and Nutritional Security.

Four NPPC on Food and Nutritional Security have taken place: 1994, 2004, 2007, and

2011. The 1st NPPC on Food and Nutritional Security followed the creation of an important new

participatory space, the Council of Food and Nutritional Security (CONSEA), in 1993. CONSEA

has its origins in the popular mobilizations against corruption during the presidency of Fernando

Collor. As the drive to impeach Collor gained momentum in 1992, sociologist Herbert de Souza

(known as “Betinho”) sought to channel popular demands for reforming democracy into broader

claims for greater socio-economic equality, and in 1993 he founded what remains to this day one

of Brazil’s most prominent CSOs: Ação da Cidadania Contra a Fome e a Miséria e pela Vida

(Citizen Action against Hunger and Misery and for Life).17

By the end of 1993, this grass-root

movement had opened 75 offices across Brazil and had instigated the country’s largest

16

For the impact of NPPC on policymaking and lawmaking for historically under-represented groups (women,

LGBT, indigenous people, black people, elderly, people with disabilities, etc.) see Pogrebinschi 2013, forthcoming. 17

The organization’s home page can be found at http://www.acaodacidadania.com.br/

http://www.acaodacidadania.com.br/

28

antipoverty social mobilization to date: the Natal sem Fome campaign (“Christmas without

Hunger”). Ação da Cidadania engaged hundreds of other CSOs and hundreds of thousands of

people, which consolidated social activism against hunger and poverty and provided the

incentive for President Itamar Franco to create CONSEA and to organize the 1st NPPC on Food

Security in 1994.

When Fernando Henrique Cardoso took office in 1995, he shut CONSEA down, and

dialogue with civil society on food and nutritional issues was severely curtailed. The next NPPC

on this policy area would only take place after Cardoso had left office. Cardoso’s years were

difficult for Brazilian CSOs attempting to influence food and nutritional security policy

(Menezes 2006, Zimmermann 2011), largely because Cardoso and his party (the PSDB, Party of

Brazilian Social Democracy) did not place as much programmatic value on participatory

governance practices as the PT (Pogrebinschi 2012c, Samuels 2012).

Food and Nutritional Security policy would gain far greater attention when the PT won

the presidency in 2003. Lula made a point of repeatedly emphasizing that his government would

endeavor to eliminate hunger and misery. Demonstrating this commitment, in his first months in

office Lula reestablished the CONSEA,18

created a special Ministry to deal with food and

nutritional security policy - the Ministry of Social Development - and launched important

comprehensive national policies like the Programa Fome Zero (Zero Hunger Program) and the

world-famous Bolsa Família (Family Grant) conditional cash assistance program. Moreover,

Lula issued the call for the 2nd

NPPC on Food and Nutritional Security, which took place in

March 2004. CONSEA also organized Food and Nutritional Security NPPCs in 2007 and 2011.

18

CONSEA now has 57 members: 38 CSO representatives, 19 representatives from government agencies, and 28

invited observers

29

The 2004 conference established a more comprehensive conception of food and

nutritional security, aggregating elements from agriculture, healthcare and nutrition (the first

Conference did not contain the word “Nutritional” in its name). It also sought to institutionalize

the joint involvement of government and civil society in designing and implementing relevant

future policies (Menezes 2006). Although the number of new policies in this area does not

increase very significantly after 2004, the fruit of this joint effort can be seen in the relevance

and relatively high impact of the policies that have emerged from the NPPC process after 2004.

One of the main goals of the 2004 NPPC on Food and Nutritional Security was “to

institutionalize a sustainable system of Food and Nutritional Security, assuring the regulation of

food and nutritional security policies as a comprehensive public policy, provided with a proper

Organic Law and a budget” (Priority Proposal 1.2, Final Report of the 2nd

NPPC on Food and

Nutritional Security, 2004). This far-ranging goal was met two years later, with the enactment of

the Organic Law of Food and Nutritional Security (widely known as LOSAN) (Law 11.346 of

September 2006). This law - as per an NPPC suggestion - created the National System of Food

and Nutritional Security (SISAN), and fulfilled several other NPPC demands. The SISAN made

joint state-society participation mandatory for all future discussions of food and nutritional

security-related polices, by making NPPCs on Food and Nutritional Security a component part of

the system, and giving it responsibility for both providing new policy suggestions as well as

evaluating the effectiveness of existing policies (Article 11.1). The SISAN law also requires the

CONSEA to convene an NPPC on Food and Nutritional Security at least once every four years

(Article 11.2.a), and requires it to “take into account” the NPPC deliberations and final report

guidelines for the creation of new policies (Article 11, 2, b). In short, the SISAN now requires

30

grass-roots participation in the creation and evaluation of policies related to Food and Nutritional

Security.

Let us now describe the evolution of policy in this area, at each stage revealing the

participatory nature of the process. The 2006 Organic Law was only the first step towards

consolidating a participatory framework for food and nutritional security policy. In 2007 the 3rd

NPPC on Food and Nutritional Security took place. One of its primary recommendations was the

creation, within the SISAN framework, of an Inter-Ministerial Chamber of Food and Nutritional

Security that would coordinate and integrate the work of all federal government agencies dealing

with food and nutritional security (Final Report, Article 1). The NPPC also recommended that

this working group elaborate the new National Policy (Article 1, I a) and long-range National

Plan (Article 1, I b) for Food and Nutritional Security, “based on guidelines provided by

CONSEA”- which, as noted above, took its own cues from the NPPCs’ deliberations - again,

ensuring that grass-roots input would guide national policy decisions.

A second important step, which emerged from the NPPC process, moved Brazil closer to

guaranteeing its citizens with adequate nutrition. In February 2010 Constitutional Amendment 64

was promulgated, converting the “right to nourishment” into a human right, including it

alongside the social rights guaranteed in Brazil’s 1988 Constitution. This constituted a victory

not merely for the NPPC process but for every single Brazilian citizen, who now could claim

proper nourishment as a constitutional right, to be respected and enforced by concrete

government action. To this end, in August 2010, Presidential Decree 7.272 enacted the National

Food and Nutritional Security Policy (PNSAN), Brazil’s first comprehensive policy in this area.

This decree fulfilled the broad aim of the 2004 NPPC of comprehensively regulating food and

nutritional security policies, and took into account several specific deliberations from the 1994,

31

2004 and 2007 NPPCs on Food and Nutritional Security. The decree not only defined the policy

but also determined how it should be managed, financed, monitored and evaluated - and

provided a role for the NPPCs in all of those stages (Article 7.1).

In September 2011 a third and perhaps most important step was taken: following the

precise prescriptions of the 2006 Organic Law and the 2010 Constitutional Amendment, the

Inter-Ministerial Chamber of Food and Nutritional Security finalized the draft of the long-term

National Plan of Food and Nutritional Security. This proposal was the fruit of join work of

representatives from 19 Ministries and members of CONSEA, about two-thirds of whom are

CSO representatives. As with the 2006 Organic Law, the 2007 Presidential Decree, and the 2010

Constitutional Amendment, the drafting of the Plan also took into consideration the deliberations

of all previous NPPCs on Food and Nutritional Security. The resulting Plan, a 132-page

document denoted the “PLANSAN” is far more comprehensive than the “PNSAN” enacted one

year earlier (see above), and it defines precisely how policy in the area will be implemented.19

The plan provides such details for a four-year period (2012-2015), describing policy aims, goals

and objectives and determining the responsibilities and attributions of different federal agencies.

The PLANSAN in effect consolidates the process initiated with the 2004 NPPC and all the

policies and programs that followed it, and reproduces almost word-for-word several

recommendations from the 2007 NPPC, particularly concerning new policy issues that were not

deliberated in earlier NPPCs, such as genetically modified food crops, agro-ecology, and the

human right of adequate nourishment.

The PLANSAN is translated into specific actions and programs mainly by the Ministry of

Social Development and Combat against Hunger (Ministério do Desenvolvimento Social e

19

Available at

http://www.mds.gov.br/segurancaalimentar/arquivos/LIVRO_PLANO_NACIONAL_CAISAN_FINAL.pdf,

accessed August 1, 2012.

http://www.mds.gov.br/segurancaalimentar/arquivos/LIVRO_PLANO_NACIONAL_CAISAN_FINAL.pdf

32

Combate à Fome - MDS), which is in charge of providing citizens with regular access to food

and water in sufficient quantity and quality. The activities carried out by the MDS allow us to see

how the NPPC deliberations are translated into new policy, which is in turn translated into

effective government action impacting the lives of millions of Brazilians.

Let’s consider two examples. The first is the Food Acquisition Program (Programa de

Aquisição de Alimentos - PAA), which provides food for malnourished people and promotes

social and economic inclusion in rural areas through improvements in family agriculture. Just in

2011 the PAA attended to the needs of 19,728,731 people, using R$451.565.322.67 in budgetary

funding (about US$223 million). The program also spent an additional R$157,948,363.44 (about

US$78 million) fomenting the production and consumption of milk.20

Two key principles from the PLANSAN orient this program. The PLANSAN’s first

guideline seeks to “promote universal access to adequate and healthy nourishment, prioritizing

families and persons in a situation of food and nutritional insecurity” (CAISAN, 49) – and this

guideline is grounded in the content of eight proposals from the 1997 NPPC, eight from the 2004

conference, and 11 from the 2007 conference. The PLANSAN also seeks to “enable tools that

finance, support and protect production and income as a strategy of productive inclusion and

income enhancement of family agriculture…” (CAISAN, 62) – and this goal is grounded in five

deliberations from the 1994 NPPC, seven from 2004, and 10 from 2007. Clearly, a direct

connection exists between NPPC deliberations and proposals to important nationwide policies.

A second example is the First Water Action program (Ação Primeira Água), which is

grounded in PLANSAN’s 6th

major guideline, “to guarantee access to water for human

consumption and for production by rural and low-income populations, in order to provide

sufficient quality and quantity for food and nutritional security” (CAISAN, 103). This guideline,

20

Data available at: http://aplicacoes.mds.gov.br/sagi/paa/visi_paa_geral/pg_principal.php?url=geral_modalidade

http://aplicacoes.mds.gov.br/sagi/paa/visi_paa_geral/pg_principal.php?url=geral_modalidade

33

in turn, is grounded in one deliberation from the 1994 national conference, four from 2004, and

ten from 2007. Again illustrating the connection between participatory processes and important

policy output, the MDS estimates that this program will provide almost one million needy

families across Brazil with access to water through 2015.21

The PLANSAN was drafted just in time to be deliberated at the national stage of the 4th

NPPC on Food and Nutritional Security in 2011, where it was expected that representatives from

all 27 state governments would formally sign their adhesion to it, signaling nation-wide

government adherence to the policy goals initially deliberated jointly by CSOs and government

officials. All 1,626 delegates to the national conference - representing the 75,237 people from

3,200 municipalities that held prior meetings - also signed a “political document” that prefaces

the 2011 Conference’s Final Report, declaring their support for the National Plan “as a tool for

planning, managing and implementing the National Policy of Food and Nutritional Security, as

well as for realizing the human right to an adequate and healthy nourishment” (Final Report of

the 4th

NPPC on Food and Nutritional Security, page X).22

After the deliberation and debate in the 4th

NPPC, the PLANSAN was officially and

legally enacted, through Resolution #1 of the Inter-Ministerial Chamber of Food and Nutritional

Security in April 2012. In short, over a span of about eight years, including a transition from

Lula to Dilma, the participatory process that began with the 2nd

NPPC in 2004 was completed -

or maybe we should say it had just begun, since the last proposition of the political document

opening the 2011 NPPC Final Report says: “the future of Brazil and the world depends on the

deepening of participatory democracy.”

21

Data available at: http://www.mds.gov.br/segurancaalimentar/fomento-a-producao-e-a-estruturacao-produtiva-

1/acesso-a-agua/primeira-agua , accessed August 15, 2012. 22

Available at http://www.cadufonseca.com.br/Rel4Conf.pdf, accessed August 1, 2012

http://www.mds.gov.br/segurancaalimentar/fomento-a-producao-e-a-estruturacao-produtiva-1/acesso-a-agua/primeira-agua

http://www.mds.gov.br/segurancaalimentar/fomento-a-producao-e-a-estruturacao-produtiva-1/acesso-a-agua/primeira-agua

http://www.cadufonseca.com.br/Rel4Conf.pdf

34

Conclusion

Theorists and empirical scholars have long assumed that democracy and participation are

necessarily in tension – that modern democracies are necessarily representative, and that active

participation by average citizens beyond voice or the act of voting cannot shape actual policy

outcomes. Despite its normative shortcomings, this “minimalist” paradigm has become dominant

in studies of actually-existing democracies. Democratic theorists have envisioned far more

substantive notions of democracy in recent years, yet most arguments for participatory and

deliberative democracy fall short in terms of substantive importance due to their small scale or

local level impact.

Our empirical findings have an important theoretical implication: that the supposedly

minimalist paradigm can accommodate a far broader notion of participation than typically

supposed. Democracy may not require such participation, but it can accommodate it. Civil

society participation can provide the inspiration for and facilitate national-level policy-making –

meaning that Brazil’s National Public Policy Conferences pass the crucial test for any theory of

participatory democracy - a test critics have long supposed participation could never pass - that

uncoerced individual engagement can have causal efficacy on the exercise of governance at the

national level.

These findings highlight how our research departs from existing studies of participatory

democracy, which have focused on small-scale “mini-publics.” Brazil’s innovative NPPCs have

opened space for literally millions of average citizens to play an active part in the creation of

new public policies. This is, to our knowledge, the first evidence that participatory governance

practices can, through a process that does involve representation and delegation, be both scaled

up to the national level and that shape important outcomes at the “macro” democracy level. This

35

finding undermines the most obvious objection to the significance of participatory practices: that

they are impractical and thus unimportant to the functioning of democracy.

If our findings clearly support our main contention, many questions remain. For one, we

do not know who shows up to the local-level NPPC meetings, or who gets elected as a delegate

to the state and/or national level meetings. It would be no surprise to discover that most

participants are already highly active in civil-society organizations – but given the numbers of

participants involved, research might reveal that a plurality of participants are relative amateurs

in terms of social activism. To what extent do the political views of NPPC participants differ

from average Brazilians? Are NPPC participants more or less likely to be supporters of the PT,

or of other political parties than average?

Key issues we lack space to consider include the question of the extent to which there

exists overlap in the policy proposals that originate in municipal-level NPPC meetings across

Brazil, and the question of the extent to which we find such “grass roots” proposals in NPPC

final reports, published after the national meeting. Pogrebinschi’s (2012d) preliminary research

suggests that to a considerable extent, “grass roots” input originating at the local level does

influence the national-level conference outcomes - as well as national and state policies. Future

empirical research will be able to address these questions in greater depth. Qualitative research -

interviews of participants - would also illuminate the important question of the extent to which

“top-down” versus “bottom-up” influence dominates setting the agenda for upcoming NPPCs.

We do know that it is a two-way street; for example, CSOs had been active on the question of

hunger for years before Lula took office, but Lula also indicated clearly that he would make

eradicating hunger a policy priority. Additional research should attempt to detail the agenda-

36

setting process in greater detail, to place claims about grass-roots participatory influence on more

solid footing.

A related question is explaining why only certain NPPC proposals are converted into

public policies. NPPCs make hundreds of suggestions. Congress and the executive branch take

up a fraction of those proposals as proposed legislation, only a small proportion of which manage

to be converted into law. How do elected and/or appointed officials - in the government or the

opposition - assess the potential political costs and benefits of different NPPC proposals? Why

do politicians take up only some NPPC proposals, but not others? And of those NPPC proposals

considered and proposed as new laws, why do only a fraction gain passage? What sort of NPPC

deliberations are more likely to become new policy?

Finally, an important question for understanding the evolution of participatory practices

in Brazil’s democracy is the extent to which the NPPC process is “institutionalized” across all

policy areas. In some policy areas (e.g. food security and social assistance) it is now a legal

requirement to hold an NPPC every few years. If and when the PT loses power, the government

will be required to continue to hold conferences – and to maintain CSO influence within the

national government – in these policy areas. But to what extent is this true of other policies? At

issue is a much broader question for students of Brazilian politics and participatory innovations:

“How transformative has the PT’s administrations been in terms of state-society joint

governance?” To what extent has the PT really changed citizens’ ability to access and influence

Brazilian government? Although the PT has sought to identify itself with participatory

governance since its founding around 1980, our findings suggest that NPPCs can influence

policy output regardless of the party in power, but they are not enough to respond all of the

above questions.

37

Despite the various questions left unanswered and awaiting further research, our paper’s

empirical findings answer one question with certainty: Participatory practices can change the

way that government officials understand the nature of political problems and assess the costs

and benefits of particular policies, and they can offer elected officials greater information about

the potential impact different policy solutions might have on citizens’ lives. Participatory

practices can introduce new issues into the policy agenda, calling attention to interests and

opinions not captured by the electoral process and thus left underrepresented by the minimalist

configuration of representative democracy. Such important outcomes indicate not only how an

enlarged role for participation can be accommodated within a minimalist concept of democracy

without threatening its actual institutional configuration, but also how the latter can be

redesigned in order to accommodate civil society’s demands for a more responsive government.

38

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42

Table 1: Policy Themes Deliberated in National Public Policy Conferences, 1988-2010

Major Theme Specific Theme Years

Health

Health 1992, 1996, 2000, 2003, 2007

Oral Health 1993, 2004

Indigenous Peoples’ Health 1993, 2001, 2006

Mental Health 1992, 2001

Environmental Health 2009

Workers’ Health 1994, 2005

Science, Technology & Innovation in Health 1994, 2004

Management of Healthcare Labor &

Education 1994, 2006

Medicines and Pharmaceutical Care 2003

Minorities and

Human Rights

Human Rights Annually 1996-04, 2006, 2008

Children’s and Adolescents’ Rights Semi-annually 1995-2009

Rights of the Elderly 2006, 2009

Disabled Peoples’ Rights 2006, 2009

LGBT Rights 2008

Indigenous Peoples 2006

Public Policies for Women 2004, 2007

Youth 2008

Promotion of Racial Equality 2005, 2009

Brazilian Communities Abroad 2008, 2009

State, Economy,

and Development

Food and Nutritional Security 1994, 2004, 2007

Science, Technology and Innovation 2001, 2005, 2010

Solidary Economy 2006

Local Productive Arrangements 2004, 2005, 2007

Aquaculture and Fishing 2003, 2006, 2009

Sustainable & Solidary Rural Development 2008

Cities 2003, 2005, 2007

Public Security 2009

Communication 2009

Environment 2003, 2005 2008

Environment, Children and Adolescents 2003, 2006, 2009

Civil Defense and Humanitarian Assistance 2010

Human Resources of Federal Public

Administration 2009

Social Assistance,

Education,

Culture, and

Sports

Social Assistance 1995, 1997; semi-annually 2001-09

Basic Education 2008

Professional and Technical Education 2006, 2008

Indigenous Education 2009

Education 2010

Sports 2004, 2006

Culture 2005, 2010

43

44

Table 2: Selected Statutes Originating with Women’s Policy NPPCs

Law 10.886

of 7/14/04

Altered Brazil’s 1940 Penal Code, creating the category of

“Domestic Violence.”

Law 11.340

of 8/7/06

The “Maria da Penha” law: created mechanisms to reduce

domestic violence against women, and made Brazil’s penal and

legal system conform to its constitution and to international

treaties against gender discrimination

Law 11.489

of 6/20/07

Created December 6th

as National Day of Men’s Mobilization

against Domestic Violence.

Law 11.942

of 5/28/09

Changed existing penal legislation to assure women prisoners

and their newborns access to healthcare.

Law 12.121

of 12/15/09

Added to existing penal legislation requirements that women’s

prisons have only female guards.

45

46

Table 3: Selected Statutes Originating with Social Assistance NPPCs

Law 9.720

of 11/30/98

Alters the Organic Law of Social Assistance to 1) reduce to

60 years the age of eligibility for a social assistance pension

for the poorest of the elderly, among other items

Law 11.258

of 12/30/05

Alters existing assistance legislation to assure migrant,

itinerant and homeless people have access to social-

assistance services

47

48

Table 4: Selected Statutes Originating with Food & Nutritional Security NPPCs

Constitutional

Amendment #31

of 2000

Created the Fund for Combat and Eradication of Poverty

Law 9.782 of

1/26/99

Defined the National Sanitary Vigilance System and created the

National Sanitary Vigilance Agency, which made obligatory the

publication of drinking water quality test results.

Law 10.278 of

2001

Provided R$484 million in budgetary resources to fortify, amplify,

and simplify food-distribution programs.

Law 11.346 of

9/15/06

Created the National Food and Nutritional Security System

(SISAN), which aims to assure the right to adequate nourishment.

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