The Limits to Citizen Power: Participatory Democracy and the Entanglements of the State (Anthropology, Culture and Society) - Softcover

Albert, Victor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745336175 ISBN 13: 9780745336176

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2016

Über diesen Titel

Críticas

'Takes readers deep inside the interworking of the one of world's most well-known participatory experiences. Albert's excellent contribution to the study of citizen participation illuminates the problems of embedding participatory democracy inside existing state structures' -- Dr. Brian Wampler, Professor of Political Science, Boise State University (USA)

Reseña del editor

In the twilight of Brazil’s military regime, a new autonomous union movement emerged in the industrial city of Santo André that would eventually lead to the formation of the Workers’ Party and a whole raft of participatory reform. Today, Brazil is cited, and celebrated, as a laboratory for popular and participatory forms of government. However, no political project can exist entirely outside the power relations from which it is trying to emerge.

Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic research, Victor Albert provides a critical analysis of citizen participation in Santo André, in Greater São Paulo. He explores how a limited administrative capacity, a fractured and largely demobilised civil society, and a clientelism and patronage politics all cut against the democratic grain, largely relegating the participating citizenry to playing bit parts in the theatre of local politics in which they should have starred.

Participatory Democracy and the Entanglements of the State offers a fascinating window into how the power relations between political appointees, public officials and local community activists is expressed and reproduced in everyday interactions in public assemblies and meetings. Albert also reveals how different social actors think and feel about citizen participation away from formal assemblies, and how they continue to engage in what is a tenuous, and at times mutually distrustful, tactical and strategic relationship with political patrons.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0745336175
• ISBN 13: 9780745336176
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224