Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a democratic policy innovation created in Brazil in the early 1990s, recognized worldwide as an effective policy tool for directly involving the population in budget decisions. Its diffusion in Brazil was strongly stimulated by the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT) as a showcase of the ‘Petista Way of Governing’. However, after the party took the presidential office, PB lost its status as a top participatory policy. Without its leading promoter, PB gradually declined in […]

This article addresses the subject of clientelism with reference to an unprecedented set of data resulting from a survey of 422 municipal councilors in 44 Brazilian municipalities. Our aim was to verify whether a propensity for clientelist behavior was uniformly distributed among the councilors surveyed and, in the event that it was not, to identify factors that could explain any variations. Our analysis revealed that clientelism – understood as the degree of exposure on the part of councilors to voter […]