The Power of Participatory Democracy: Exploring Local Innovations in Peru

• In Event: Renovating and Reimagining Local Democracy amidst National Retrenchment

Abstract

Can the rapid expansion of participatory institutions (PIs) around the world help counteract the global decline of democracy? While prior literature suggests that PIs can improve the quality of democracy, few works explore whether they affect democratic resilience—the capacity of democracies to withstand anti-democratic challenges and overcome disillusionment with democratic institutions. We have good reason to believe they might. If, as a range of previous scholars have found, PIs can increase the legitimacy of democratic decision-making in the public’s eyes, then it is reasonable to expect that this effect will decrease citizen disillusionment with democracy more generally and weaken citizen receptiveness to authoritarian alternatives. This is precisely the aspect of PIs that has made them so appealing to many government officials and civil society leaders around the world. To date, however, we know little about whether there is any empirical connection between PIs and democratic resilience, and, if so, what specific mechanisms are responsible for creating it.
We offer a theoretical framework for conceptualizing how PIs can improve democratic resilience–and thus improve democracy’s long-term prospects–and a multifaceted empirical test of our theory in a challenging context where democratic institutions have consistently buckled and even broken under the weight of authoritarian challengers: Peru.
We argue that PIs increase democratic resilience through three primary channels. First, PIs improve citizen perceptions of government responsiveness: PIs signal to citizens that the government is opening up decision-making to citizen input more than in the past and makes them feel that government is more responsive to their preferences. The next mechanism runs through PIs’ effect on citizen well-being: when PIs direct resources to programs citizens need, those programs have a material impact on citizens’ lives, which, in turn, makes citizens more likely to feel that government is functioning effectively. Finally, since PIs offer a space for ordinary citizens to engage directly in government decision-making, they can help to address inequalities in political participation across gender, ethnicity, and class, that, in turn, ameliorate feelings of exclusion on the part of subordinate groups in society.
Drawing upon original surveys, survey experiments, interviews with local government officials and civil society activists, and unique panel datasets of nationally imposed participatory budgeting in Peru between 2004 and 2021, our work provides robust evidence that inviting everyday citizens to participate in local political decisions can improve democratic resilience at the local level. Whether through direct participation in PIs or by simply learning that PIs exist in one’s community, we find that PIs make citizens feel better about how their local government operates in Peru. We further find consistent evidence to support our hypothesized pathways of citizen well-being and government responsiveness.
At the same time our findings reveal several critical shortcomings that should lead us to reserve final judgment about PIs’ capacity to improve democratic resilience. Contrary to our expectations and previous literature, we are not able to document any meaningful effect of increased local government commitment to PIs when measured as the percentage of local governments’ investment budget allocated to PIs. PIs are not operating efficiently in Peru and their capacity to improve citizen well-being is likely limited as a result. In turn, troublingly, we find that PIs have little or no impact on the inclusion and empowerment of marginalized groups in political decision-making processes in conditions like those in Peru. Finally, though we find that PIs can generate modest improvements in local level democratic resilience, these effects are not scaling up to the national level, where dissatisfaction with and mistrust of government are as high as ever. We hypothesize that this disconnect is a result of several factors: poor implementation of PIs in many contexts, limited public awareness of PIs, and, most of all, the absence of complementary political and social reforms that would help to reinforce PIs’ democracy-enhancing potential.
This work contributes to our understanding of democracy, democratic backsliding, PIs, local governance, and citizen participation. It is the first study to both theorize and systematically test the effects of PIs on democratic resilience. As such, the findings advance our knowledge of whether and how efforts to open government up to increased citizen input can help combat crises of democratic representation. It is generally optimistic about the decision to engage citizens in public policy decision-making as a way to improve local democracy. Though PIs are no panacea, they are a valuable tool in the arsenal of democracy’s advocates trying to counter the spread of authoritarianism around the world.

Authors

• Jared Abbott, California State University, Los Angeles

• Stephanie McNulty, Franklin and Marshall College