Overview

This work explores the reasons behind the interest in participatory democracy throughout the world, and explores, through a case study of Brazil, the promise of participatory democracy as a practical alternative to current civic disengagement/elitist democracy/retreats from democracy back to authoritarian politics. Nylen's exploration centres around one example of participatory democracy - ""participatory budgeting"" carried out in Brazil by the Workers' Party. Nylen thinks this example can be seen as representative of the type of participatory institutional reform being experimented with in many corners of the globe, including the US.

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9781403963062

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Reviews

Nylen has the courage to reopen the fundamental question of whether a workable democracy has to be remote, media-mediated experience, or whether there is a way to reestablish the old Greek notion of citizenship as participation. --Douglas Chalmers, Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, Columbia University <br> William Nylen's Participatory Democracy vs. Elitist Democracy: Lessons from Brazil is 'controversial' in the best tradition of the social sciences. Reminiscent of Tocqueville's classic Democracy in America, Nylen's study eschews the conventions of mainstream comparative politics to highlight surprising commonalities between democratic politics in Brazil, one of the world's most egregiously unequal societies with a deeply rooted legacy of authoritarianism, and the maladies of representative democracy and widespread civic disengagement in the contemporary United States. Passionately written and theoretically sophisticated, this examination of the complexities and realities of participatory budgeting in several of Brazil's cities governed by the Workers' Party advances many insights and lessons about the pathologies and cynicism of elite dominated politics everywhere, including our own country. --William C. Smith, University of Miami, Editor, Latin American Politics and Society<br>

Author Information

WILLIAM NYLEN is Professor of Latin American Studies at Stetson University, USA.

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