Citizens' Power in Latin America, livre ebook

Citizens' Power in Latin America takes the reader into the heart of communities where average citizens are attempting to build a new democratic model to improve their socioeconomic conditions and to have a voice in decisions that affect their lives. Based on groundbreaking fieldwork conducted in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Chile, Pascal Lupien contrasts two models of participatory design that have emerged in Latin America and identifies the factors that enhance or diminish the capacity of these mechanisms to produce positive outcomes. He draws on lived experiences of citizen participants to reveal the potential and the dangers of participatory democracy. Why do some democratic innovations appear to succeed while others fail? To what extent do these institutions really empower citizens, and in what ways can they be used by governments to control participation? What lessons can be learned from these experiments? Given the growing dissatisfaction with existing democratic systems across the world, this book will be of interest to people seeking innovative ways of deepening democracy.
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Part I. Participatory Democracy in Theory and Practice
1. Introduction: The Emergence of Democratic Institutional Innovation in Latin America
2. Theoretical Origins of Citizen Participation
3. Institutionalization of Citizen Participation in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Chile: Models of Participatory Design
Part II. The Cases
4. Venezuela: Radical Participatory Democracy
5. Ecuador: Radical Discourse, Dashed Expectations
6. Chile: Pragmatic Citizen Participation
7. Conclusions and Prospects
Notes
Works Cited
Index