Bras. Political Sci. Rev.2020;14(3):e0006.
Paths For Building Strong Participatory Institutions in Latin America
DOI: 10.1590/1981-3821202000030008
The Participatory Institutions (IPs) are expected to reduce the inequalities by including new players and demands from marginalized groups into the decision processes. Yet, what are the paths that lead the IPs to become strong enough to fulfill that role? That is the central question that Lindsay Mayka (2019) seeks to answer in her book based on a comparative study of the health and social assistance councils of Brazil and the planning and health councils of Colombia, which the Federal government also created and regulated and which the subnational spheres carried out. She concluded that the paths that the Brazilian councils followed bequeathed strong institutions, unlike the one that the Colombians followed. From that ‘transnational and inter-sectorial’ comparative analysis, she takes away the theoretical unfoldings that would explain to other contexts the determinant factors of the IP institutionalization processes. That is a unique contribution to such study agenda, which experiences the challenge to produce knowledge with greater generalization power.
Her work is inserted in the debate on institutional strength, which represented an inflection in the institutionalist studies that, until then, focused on the institutional design as the determinant variable for political results. On the other hand, the idea of institutional strength provides importance to the broader conditions on which the effectiveness and the stability of the institutions themselves might be dependent (, ). It is based on that benchmark that Mayka (2019) dialogues with the bibliography about IPs, thus providing a precious contribution to the Brazilian studies, mainly taking into consideration the current political changes that make the future of those institutions in Brazil uncertain. After three decades of expansion, what we ask today is to what extent they gathered strength to remain active in a new scenario in which those in power not only express clear preferences for centralized power arrangements, but they also systematically disqualify the democratic institutions as mediators between State and society. When it qualifies and conceptualize the different dimensions, the determinant factors and the possible results of the institutionalization processes of participation, Mayka’s work (2019) provides important inputs for us to scrutinize the institutional strength of the Brazilian IPs based on that scenario.
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