This article compares participatory budgeting institutions in four Brazilian cities: Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, Recife and Curitiba. The three former cities use participatory budgeting while the latter holds public hearings in which proposals are made for budget-related legislation, namely the Bill of Budgetary Guidelines ( Lei de Diretrizes Orçamentárias (LDO)) e and the Annual Budgeting Bill (Lei Orçamentária Anual (LOA)). Our goal is to analyze to what extent the institutions we study move close to the normative premises of the theory of deliberative democracy, according to which the legitimacy of political decisions and processes flows from free public deliberation which people take part in as equals. Our empirical research considers the following dimensions of our variables: (i) institutional design: institutional framework and functioning, conditions of participation, discussion and deliberation; (ii) context: degree of civil associativity for each city and the configuration of the political groups that implant the participatory arrangements; (iii) politics: the scope of social representation and participation and (iv) accountability: transparency and responsiveness that these public forums make possible within civil society. Among our most important findings, we have seen those that are closer to the principles of deliberative democracy are those whose experiences have been built from grass-roots civil society and implanted by political groups with an explicit goal of increasing social participation in public deliberation. The prevalence of a technical bureaucracy that presides over participatory processes has exactly the opposite effect.
Democracy; Deliberation; Participatory Budgeting; Public Hearings
