Political Competition in Deliberative and Participatory Institutions

My dissertation investigates local governments that introduce participatory and deliberative institutions. Most of the current literature analyzing participatory and deliberative institutions centers on institutional design, the analysis of outcomes (e.g. reduction in poverty), and the identification of pre-conditions (e.g. level of inequality or CSOs activity) that might alter such outcomes. Analysts, critical of deliberative and participatory forms of democracy, claim that this literature does not sufficiently consider the effect of interest groups, media, and, more broadly, political competition. Motivated by such critiques, my dissertation addresses three key empirical questions. First, what are the effects of political competition on deliberative and participatory institutions? Second, what are the effects, if any, of such institutions on political competition? Finally, what are the effects, if any, of such institutions on public policy? My argument is that political competition is a key variable that explains the diffusion and evolution of these institutions. Secondly, while I do not identify any significant impact of deliberative and participatory institutions on public policies, I argue that these institutions significantly impact political competition and I identify a key behavioral mechanism that explains this impact.;Methodologically the dissertation investigates political competition with a large-N observational study of Brazilian municipalities adopting participatory budgeting between 1989 and 2008. The case of Brazilian participatory budgeting is chosen due to the almost unique availability of data and the fact that participatory and deliberative institutions were self-adopted at the city level, in distinction from other important cases of deliberative and participatory institutions (e.g. Kerala). Various theorists speculate on the effects of political competition on deliberative and participatory institutions. Chapter two of this dissertation directly studies the impact of political competition on the diffusion of deliberative and participatory decision making processes. Analysis of the pattern of diffusion over the last 20 years shows that the adoption of participatory budgeting is different from the adoption of other policy innovations analyzed by the State literature, not assuming over time the S-shape typical of many technocratic policy innovations. I propose two mechanisms that explain the unusual diffusion of participatory budgeting in the Brazilian case. The first posits that participatory budgeting is adopted by mayors looking to expand their political support. The second mechanism claims that the Workers' Party has branded participatory budgeting as a proprietary policy. This implies an additional adoption cost for cities not controlled by the Workers' Party.;The dissertation also investigates the impact of participatory budgeting on electoral results and budgetary policies (chapter three). To the contrary of previous anecdotal evidence the results show that participatory budgeting does not alter the composition of public spending and public revenues. However participatory budgeting significantly increases (∼9%) the probability of reelection of the party of the mayor. This effect is heightened when focusing on the sample of cities with more than 100000 inhabitants. Most interestingly for smaller cities the positive effect of adopting for the first time PB on the reelection of the mayor is mediated by the victory of the Workers' Party. When the Workers' Party doesn't control the city the effect disappears. For the larger cities we observe the opposite result.;Chapter four presents the results of a novel field experiment conducted in the U.S. The experiment generalizes to a completely different context one of the mechanisms identified in Brazil, the role of non-neutral moderators in deliberative and participatory processes. The experiment shows that non-neutral moderators are able to significantly alter the participants' preferences. The experiment is structured like deliberations used world-wide to make community decisions. The results indicate that if organized interest groups had influence over moderators, they might be able to easily hijack a deliberative decision-making process.;Building upon the previous empirical investigations the dissertation proposes a new operational definition of deliberative and participatory processes that highlight the numerous micro-mechanisms composing each deliberative process. Using this new definition the dissertation designs a pragmatic research agenda to evaluate and improve deliberative and participatory designs. Taken as a whole, my dissertation provides a better understanding of the possibility of introducing deliberative and participatory decision-making processes in representative democracies.