Participatory Institutions in Latin America: The Next Generation of Scholarship

Assessing four recent books on participatory budgeting and other participatory innovations in Latin America, this review article identifies these works as illustrative of a “second generation” of scholarship on what the author calls the “Participatory Promise.” Following upon the first generation of mostly single case studies of mostly successful cases, this second generation of scholarship tends to draw on a wealth of data from multiple comparable cases, both successful and unsuccessful. The end result is a clear social scientific advancement in understanding these real-world political phenomena that have demanded the attention of analysts and practitioners of contemporary democracy in Latin America for the last two decades.