It has become a commonplace in recent years among journalists, academics, and civil society reformers to emphasize the declining levels of trust ordinary Americans have in the major institutions of government. More broadly, declining trust in institutions of government is a widely shared feature among the longstanding democracies of the world.
Rather than dwell in pessimism, I want to offer a ray of hope. Is there something that can help to rejuvenate our political institutions and restore some measure of faith in American democracy? The answer can be traced back to the founding fathers. As Thomas Jefferson said (more or less), the answer to the problems of democracy is more democracy. Specifically, participatory democracy.
What is participatory democracy? The best way to describe it is to contrast participatory democracy with representative democracy. Whereas representative democracy involves periodically voting for representatives who will then act on our behalf, participatory democracy involves regular and ongoing citizen involvement in the process of decision-making, usually at the city level. UCLA political theorist Carole Pateman argues that participatory democracy occurs when “all citizens have the opportunity and the right to participate each year in a major part of city government.”
So what does this look like in practice? The most famous real-world example is known as participatory budgeting, which began in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in the 1980s. The basic idea, implemented by the left-leaning workers party (the Partido dos Trabalhadores in Portuguese), was that ordinary citizens should have a direct say in key budgeting decisions at the city level. What followed was an organized process in which residents routinely meet in their neighborhoods to formulate budgeting priorities and ultimately vote on which projects they want to fund. In the cities where this has worked best, residents have had the power to directly decide how to spend millions of dollars of new capital investments.
Participatory budgeting is not perfect and there are plenty of cases where it did not work as planned (usually because the city government refused to hand over any real power to the citizens). It has, however, had many success cases and inspired years of research on the ins and outs of the budgeting process.
The most important takeaway is that when given the power to make key decisions on multi-million dollar city investments, regular citizens have been up to the challenge. They have participated in large numbers, enjoyed the process, reduced corruption, and transformed how their cities operate. They have, in other words, been effective democratic citizens. Moreover, less-educated and less-wealthy citizens participated in much higher numbers than expected. This does not mean that participatory budgeting is perfect—after all, Brazil (like any country) has many problems that cannot be resolved just at the city level. But it does offer a counterpoint to those who would suggest that citizens are incapable of smart, hands-on participation in the mechanisms of government.
This is what participatory democracy is about: direct access to and participation in government. Participatory budgeting stands out because it offers more than an advisory role. This is not some council of citizens to be consulted—rather, participatory budgeting allows citizens to make binding budgetary decisions themselves. As participatory budgeting has become more mainstream it has spread to cities around the world, including cities in the United States, beginning with Chicago and New York City.
If participatory budgeting has begun to spread to American cities, have we felt its effects? This is a question that will take years to answer but we can look to Brazil and other countries for some evidence of its impact on politics.
As political scientist Brian Wampler has documented, participatory budgeting in Brazil has helped to redirect city expenditures to badly needed public works projects in underserved city neighborhoods. In addition to its redistributive impact participatory budgeting has also been a critical locus of participatory democratic citizenship for the poor and less educated, who participate in PB in higher numbers than might be expected. It thus has the potential to serve as a “citizenship school” for the traditionally disempowered. Survey evidence also indicates that participants feel empowered by the experience and consequently, when citizen participation is combined with positive tangible outcomes, the result is a virtuous circle of participatory democracy.
There is reason to be optimistic that PB can have similar impacts in the US if city governments are willing to devote a substantial portion of city budgets to the process. There is, however, at least one obvious objection worth mentioning. How can city-level experiments in democracy tackle the many global, interconnected problems facing the world today? These include climate change, trade, and refugee flows, to name a few.
While it is true that participatory budgeting and other municipal reforms cannot resolve these issues, they can play an important part in addressing them. As many scholars have noted, a majority of the world’s population and economic activity are located in cities. This gives mayors, and city governments more broadly, enormous power to collaborate, at a city-to-city level, in tackling problems such as climate change and income inequality.
Indeed, with the rise of the global parliament of mayors and other efforts at bringing city leaders together, cities may well be a major site of political innovation and change in the 21st century. (I am not the first to make such a claim—political theorist Benjamin Barber spent much of the past decade writing and organizing around this issue). And because cities, due to their ability to conduct government affairs in person on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, are the main sites of participatory democracy today, this means that we can address issues of global concern in a more direct and democratic manner than that offered by our gridlocked national representative institutions.
Can participatory democracy solve all the problems plaguing our representative democracy? Of course not. But, now more than ever, when it is so easy to fall into hopeless pessimism, we need to retain at least a sliver of optimism. Democracy’s long, varied history is not over yet.
For more on this topic, see my dissertation, A 21st Century Defense of Participatory Democracy and my recent trilogy of books, Democratic Knowledge, Against Elitism, and Does Democracy Have a Future?