DOES PARTICIPATION STRENGTHEN CIVIL SOCIETY?
Cabannes 2004). However, while accountability improved as a result of a more transparent and deliberative process, the forums’ lack of legal authority resulted in power remaining with the mayor’s office (Wampler 2004). These studies are descriptive or tracking analyses of largely organic innovations. They say little about how participatory budgeting would work if induced by an intervention or how any changes that resulted would compare to a counterfactual in which participatory budgeting was not introduced. One of the few counterfactual analyses of participatory budgeting is by Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva (2011), who use a discontinuity design. They match five municipalities in which the PT came to power with a small margin of victory in 1996 and subsequently implemented participatory budgeting with five municipalities in the same region and of similar size in which the PT lost by a small margin, resulting in the nonadoption of participatory budgeting. As the PT is very much a party born of civil society and Brazil’s social movements of the 1980s, Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva (2011) assume that two municipalities in which the PT garnered similar vote shares will be similar in terms of their local tradition of political activism and the composition and strength of civil society. In matching municipalities in this manner, they also try to control for scale and geography. The researchers selected five pairs of the best-matched municipalities (one pair in the South, two in the Southeast, one in the Northeast, and one in the North). Analyzing a mix of data from quantitative surveys and carefully collected in-depth interviews and group discussions, they find that, in general, participatory budgeting municipalities facilitated much more effective forms of engagement than their non–participatory budgeting counterparts. In all municipalities with participatory budgeting, the effect was to increase the flow of information about municipal governance, create a space for citizens to voice their demands and to scrutinize what were once highly insulated and discretionary decisionmaking processes. This allowed citizens to bargain from a position of greater strength with municipal authorities. There was considerable variation across the municipalities in how these outcomes were achieved, however. One municipality, João Monlevade, combined direct participation with a range of planning and coordination functions. Another, Gravataí, fashioned a set of processes that were very direct and required little mediation but that also made it
Participatory budgeting facilitated much more effective forms of engagement . . .
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