What do Councils do and When? Decision-making Standards for Participatory Institutions and their Effects

ABSTRACT

This article explores a survey on decisions taken by public policies management councils, in order to find out what they do and when they do it in terms of their life cycle. There is a consensus in literature the ziseable expansion and institutionalization of participatory bodies have led to the need for diagnoses of their effectiveness. Participatory institutions’ effectiveness agendas have contributed to advancements made in the assessment of effects on policy performance. Our aim is to contribute to the debate by adopting a different analytical strategy: focusing on the decisions taken by the councils (outputs) rather than on their effects on policies (outcomes). The findings suggest corrections to diagnoses widely accepted in literature. This approach is innovative in three senses: i) it is based on a diagnosis of the territorial evolution of municipal councils in Brazil that provides a robust empirical basis for a typology of the councils; ii) it goes on to examine the decision-making patterns for 32 councils by means of a census of decisions, that is by analysing data collected for all of the decisions made by the councils over a 7-year period (2005-2011) in the municipality of Guarulhos – an emblematic case due to the favorable conditions for implementing participatory institutions, especially during the Workers’ Party’s (PT) last four terms in office; and iii) it proposes metrics on outputs and potential policy impacts assess the councils’ decision-making patterns.

participatory institutions; effectiveness; outputs; management councils; participation