Abstract Chapter Seven explores why participatory budgeting in Peru has improved democratic quality despite the absence of commonly cited prerequisites like strong civil society and committed local leaders. It identifies three key factors: sustained information sharing between citizens and officials, a national legal framework mandating annual participatory budgeting processes, and implementation support from Peru’s powerful Ministry of Economy and Finance. Together, these elements have ensured the regular functioning of participatory budgeting, reshaped spending priorities, and gradually improved citizen well-being. The chapter shows how, even in unfavorable conditions, institutional design and bureaucratic capacity can generate meaningful democratic gains through participatory governance.

Abstract Peru offers a revealing case of how participatory institutions can strengthen democracy even in fragile contexts. Despite poor implementation, weak institutions, and widespread disillusionment, Peru’s legally mandated participatory budgeting has improved well-being, civic engagement, and perceptions of government responsiveness. The chapter shows that PIs’ presence alone—especially when sustained by law—can generate modest but meaningful democratic gains. However, serious limitations persist: women and Indigenous groups remain underrepresented, project execution is weak, and national-level impact is minimal. PIs are not a magic bullet, but with better design and support, they can serve as one tool in the fight against democratic erosion.

Abstract Can participatory institutions (PIs) facilitate development when captured by the government? We propose an original theoretical framework to investigate how changing incumbent priorities can shape the developmental and political effects of captured PIs. While patrons concerned with survival can force PIs to specialize in political activities, those pursuing regime consolidation may incentivize PIs to multitask, delivering developmental gains and political rewards. We deploy our framework to study Venezuela's Communal Councils. Leveraging difference‐in‐differences analyses, an original survey of Council participants, and 51 interviews with government officials and grassroots Communal Council members, we find that Councils yielded both economic and political returns during an early period marked by political stability and regime consolidation. However, as Venezuela's economic collapse pushed the government into an authoritarian survival mode, Councils became politically specialized. While showing that captured PIs can foster development under certain circumstances, our findings cast doubt on PIs’ development‐enhancing potential under autocracy.

Abstract This chapter introduces readers to two goals of the book: (1) to evaluate participatory institutions’ potential as a tool for improving the quality of democracy and citizens’ evaluations of democracy; and (2) to explain the paradox of a nation that has widespread participatory institutions in subnational levels yet democracy continues to be unstable and weak. The book builds on the literature on democratic quality to explore the ways that participatory institutions can change three aspects: accountability, participation, and responsiveness. The chapter also introduces the case study of Peru and the participatory institutions on which this book focuses—participatory budgeting. It concludes with an overview of the book’s key findings and contributions to existing scholarly literatures.

Abstract This chapter provides details about the diverse qualitative and quantitative datasets we employ in the book, the operationalization and measurement of key concepts, and the primary empirical strategies we employ to test our theoretical framework. It provides an overview of the data collection processes undertaken to test the theoretical framework. It describes how the authors measure each of the variables used in their quantitative analyses. Finally, the chapter covers the empirical approaches in the book. The chapter concludes by summarizing the workhorse statistical models that appear repeatedly throughout the rest of the book, with a data map that readers may refer back to as needed when working through the results later in the book.

Abstract Chapter Eight investigates whether participatory institutions like participatory budgeting can improve citizens’ evaluations of democracy in Peru. Using survey experiments, observational data, and interviews, the authors find that exposure to participatory budgeting—especially when linked to material gains like poverty reduction—leads to greater satisfaction with democracy and perceptions of government responsiveness. These effects are strongest in urban areas and among those familiar with participatory budgeting, but they do not depend on participatory budgeting intensity. The findings offer the first causal evidence that participatory institutions can improve democratic attitudes, even in challenging contexts, provided that they deliver tangible benefits.

Abstract The book explores participatory democratic institutions’ effect on the quality of democracy and, in turn, how citizens feel about the state of democracy. It tests their effects using data from Peru, a country that simultaneously has one of the most successful participatory democratic systems in the world and one of the most fragile democracies in Latin America. Part One evaluates participatory institutions’ (PIs) potential for improving three aspects of the quality of democracy: accountability, participation, and responsiveness. It demonstrates that participatory institutions can improve several aspects of democracy in this unlikely case, then explains the power of PIs as the result of information sharing that takes place over time due to a legal framework that is implemented by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. Part Two of the book examines the inherent paradox of a nation with widespread PIs in subnational governments and weak national democratic system. A range of implementation failures and design flaws, in addition to several larger structural political and social factors, have substantially muted, if not negated PIs’ utility as a tool for strengthening Peruvian democracy at the national level. The book employs original quantitative and qualitative data that have been gathered over twenty years to undertake the first mixed-method, longitudinal analysis of government-mandated PIs in a country that has carried out the process across all subnational governments over a sustained period. As such, the book makes many contributions to our understanding of local government, local development, participatory democracy, citizen engagement, and the quality of democracy.

Abstract Chapter Nine explores why, despite the tangible improvements they generate in the quality of local-level democracy and citizens’ evaluations of democracy, Peru’s participatory institutions have not been able to improve aggregate citizens’ evaluations of democracy. The authors identify both endogenous factors—such as weak design, limited resources, exclusionary practices, and poor implementation—and exogenous factors like corruption, weak party systems, and structural discrimination. These forces overwhelm the limited gains generated by PIs and explain why Peru’s participatory reforms have not reversed democratic backsliding. While PIs enhance participation and local responsiveness, their scope, intent, and institutional context are too narrow to effect broad systemic change without deeper structural reforms.

After steadily leaving the Democratic Party, working-class voters are increasingly seen as pivotal in US elections. What type of candidates should parties nominate to win over working-class voters? Parties often nominate candidates based on characteristics they think will appeal to certain groups of voters. These typically include campaign messages, such as policy positions or rhetoric, but can also include descriptive characteristics. In this paper we use a conjoint experiment to test whether candidates’ class background can activate class-based voting. Overall, we find that a candidate’s occupation has a substantial effect on voter perceptions: working-class respondents are 6.4 percentage points more likely to prefer a candidate with a working-class occupation over one with an upper-class occupation. This effect is not driven by inferences that respondents make about candidates’ policy positions or group-based rhetoric. Instead, we find that working-class voters perceive working-class candidates as more understanding of their problems. Our results suggest that candidates’ class background is an underappreciated yet effective mechanism for activating class-based voting.

Despite participatory institutions' increasing ubiquity, we know little about their effects on governance and well-being. What we do know comes largely from Brazil, where positive outcomes have been attributed to civil society's role in implementation. Often, however, participatory institutions are imposed by national governments, with little civil society engagement. In these cases, scholars have argued, participatory institutions are unlikely to improve governance and well-being, as civil society is not present to unlock the institutions' potential. We test this proposition in Peru, the first country featuring government mandated participatory institutions for all subnational governments. We find, surprisingly, that Peru's participatory budgeting process increased pro-poor spending and improved citizen's quality of life. We attribute these outcomes to reduced information asymmetries, made possible by the central role played by an influential and autonomous government agency. We employ a unique panel dataset, as well as an original survey and extensive interviews with government and civil society actors.

Political leaders around the world increasingly rely on personalist parties to win elections and govern. While existing scholarship assumes that personalist parties do not build territorial organization, in fact they vary substantially in terms of organizational strength. In this paper, we move beyond existing structural explanations of party-building and focus on the role of party elites' preferences to explain the source of this variation. Through a mixed-method approach combining process-tracing of the case studies of Venezuela's MVR/PSUV and Ecuador's Alianza PAIS and statistical analysis of Latin American parties, we find that party elites' past political experiences shape whether personalist parties successfully invest in party organization. Party officials who were socialized in radical-left parties are more likely to advocate for party-building and their presence within party cadres is associated with stronger party organization.

Although participatory institutions have become ubiquitous in contemporary politics, they often serve such different objectives that viewing the institutions as part of the same phenomenon can produce more confusion than clarity. We argue that participatory institutions can serve distinct and even opposite functions in interest intermediation, and develop a conceptual framework that distinguishes participatory institutions based on 1) what political project they were established to advance, 2) whose participation is channeled into these venues, and 3) how participatory institutions engage participants in the policymaking. We illustrate this framework with cases from Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, and Ecuador. We show that participatory institutions can serve a wide array of political projects that connect citizens to the state in radically different ways, including restructuring state -society relations to empower marginalized groups, increasing civil society influence over policymaking and government oversight, expanding parties' electoral coalitions, and constraining the influence of disruptive social movements.

How does the structure of democratic institutions affect citizen engagement? This study employs conjoint analysis to assess the effects of institutional design on political participation in participatory budgeting (PB) programs. We find evidence that PB program design strongly affects citizens' interest in participation. Participation appeals more to citizens when PB programs offer participants meaningful control over decision-making outcomes, when barriers to participation are low, and when resources allocated through PB are targeted diffusely to communities rather than individual beneficiaries. We also find that focusing PB on issues specific to marginalized communities does not necessarily boost interest in participation among members of those communities. Finally, we observe few systematic differences in preferences for participation between demographic groups traditionally associated with low rates of civic engagement compared to other groups. We then use the results surrounding PB to discuss broad implications for citizen participation in participatory institutions and democratic governance.

The three books reviewed here represent a new generation of rigorous scholarship on participatory institutions (PIs). They demonstrate that – under certain conditions – it is possible to build large-scale PIs that strengthen democratic governance and improve citizens' lives. Nonetheless, significant challenges remain. Due in part to the absence of either high-quality national-level comparative data or fine-grained subnational data, and in part to research design choices of existing studies, the literature remains limited in its capacity to make general claims about the causes and effects of large-scale PIs. Ultimately, the key question collectively addressed, but not fully answered, by the works reviewed is whether governments can build PIs that deliver on their promise to improve the quality of democracy and enhance public service provision on a large scale in diverse contexts beyond Brazil.

Why are large-scale participatory institutions implemented in some countries but only adopted on paper in others? I argue that nationwide implementation of Binding Participatory Institutions (BPIs)-a critical subtype of participatory institutions-is dependent on the backing of a strong institutional supporter, often a political party. In turn, parties will only implement BPIs if they place a lower value on the political costs than on the potential benefits of implementation. This will be true if: 1) significant societal demand exists for BPI implementation and 2) the party's political opponents cannot take advantage of BPIs for their own gain. I test this theory through two detailed case studies of Venezuela and Ecuador, drawing on 165 interviews with key national-level actors and grassroots activists.

With Venezuela’s Chavista political movement battling to keep its grassroots participatory experiments alive amid a cataclysmic economic depression, we have a new crucial case for assessing the evolution and continuation of participatory institutions under left-wing populist governments. Based on original recent survey data, we marshal evidence to show that the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela’s (PSUV) use of grassroots participation to defend the Maduro regime has weakened the quality of community-level participation, just as it may have lengthened the life-span of Chavismo’s most important and expansive the fletcher forum of world affairs 96 vol.43:2 summer 2019 participatory institution, the Communal Councils—the main phenomenon we document here. The continuation of the Councils, despite a massive economic contraction, defies expectations that the groups would disappear when conditions became considerably less favorable than during the economic boom that existed during their 2006-2008 launch. It also raises crucial questions about the power politics dimensions of grassroots-level mobilization, an aspect of participatory democracy that scholars have too often neglected.

Hugo Chávez in Venezuela is often seen as the embodiment of the recent surge in populism around the world. Much has also been written on his savvy use of mass media to disseminate his political doctrine. But how effective was Chávez' attempt to establish its populist (re)interpretation of national identity and history? Has the Chavista ideological emphasis on the common people as "true" nationals and Venezuelan history as a struggle between the exploited masses and a privileged elite indeed obtained hegemonic status? To answer this question the chapter puts the analytical spotlight on the educational reform under Chávez. Scholars have long identified mass schooling as the key institution for socializing citizens and fostering particular ideological orientations, and many states have attempted to alter the nationalist content of schooling with these ends in mind. Venezuela constitutes an ideal case for identifying the specific conditions under which new populist visions of nationhood do and do not gain broader resonance. Using evidence derived from textbook analysis and semi-structured interviews with educational officials and teachers in Caracas, we show that intrastate tensions between the central government and teachers, heightened by a well-established cultural machinery and by teachers' increasing exclusion from the Chavista political coalition, explain the limited success in government efforts to inculcate the new populist nationalism through the school curriculum.