Practicing Radical Democracy

Abstract

This article looks at one highly acclaimed experiment in local democracy where ordinary citizens were given control over the distribution of public resources, the participatory budget policy in Porto Alegre. Since the Worker's Party (PT) came to power in Porto Alegre in 1989, a popular democratic government has been established which pursues two mottos for governing: grassroots participation, and “inverting priorities” of government policies away from the privileged classes and towards the underprivileged. This paper seeks to analyze how radical democratic redefinition of the state and grassroots, participatory, redistributive polices can be achieved at a local level. The in-depth examination of this real-life attempt at radical democratization suggests that making the state both participatory and redistributive requires at least three transformative objectives: (i) the mobilization of the unorganized and the poor; (ii) bureaucracy must become more flexible and responsive; (ii) widespread political support.