Limits to Citizen Power

In the twilight of Brazil's military regime, a new autonomous union movement emerged in the industrial city of Santo Andre that would eventually lead to the formation of the Workers' Party and a whole raft of participatory reform. Today, Brazil is cited, and celebrated, as a laboratory for popular and participatory forms of government. However, no political project can exist entirely outside the power relations from which it is trying to emerge. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic research, Victor Albert provides a critical analysis of citizen participation in Santo Andre, in Greater Sao Paulo. He explores how a limited administrative capacity, a fractured and largely demobilised civil society, and a clientelism and patronage politics all cut against the democratic grain, largely relegating the participating citizenry to playing bit parts in the theatre of local politics in which they should have starred. Participatory Democracy and the Entanglements of the State offers a fascinating window into how the power relations between political appointees, public officials and local community activists is expressed and reproduced in everyday interactions in public assemblies and meetings. Albert also reveals how different social actors think and feel about citizen participation away from formal assemblies, and how they continue to engage in what is a tenuous, and at times mutually distrustful, tactical and strategic relationship with political patrons.