‘Success’

The outcome condition I explain is citizen control of collective decisions in PB (ccpb): the ultimate aim is to draw on a range of cases to explain the conditions under which citizen control of budget spending decisions is effectively established. This is where democratic participation and authority over budget decisions by ‘ordinary people’ becomes a regular expectation. Citizen control of budgetary decisionmaking is understood to take place when both agenda-setting and decision-making power in budget decisions is directed by, and open to, all citizens.

This can, of course, happen to a matter of degree – different factors can contribute to check decision-making and/or agenda-setting power. On the surface these powers are easy to observe and measure by looking at the rules of the process – for example, citizen control may be affected by whether de jure vetoes for citizen groups are in place. I was interested in measuring de facto citizen control, however. This meant collecting and synthesizing a variety of qualitative information that signalled different degrees of power, including observations of what level of co-optation took place in both setting agendas and making final decisions. Wampler shows, for instance, that despite the strong rhetoric of co-governance in Santo André, government officials and the mayor's office benefited in controlling the process by having far more access to important information and the apparatus of the state. Despite a de jure veto for both sides according to the rules, the only de facto veto was exercised by the administration (2007a: 178–9). Also, decisions need to be made with the knowledge that they will be accounted for and enforced. Some system of monitoring of outcomes was more or less a constant rather than a variable across cases but, in reality, implementation of projects differs across cases. In several cases citizen control is lost in administrative prohibitions. While perfect implementation is far from expected, even for political dictators, administrators can provide numerous reasons for non-implementation, and many are tinged with a sense that power asymmetries lie unaffected (Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2016).

Chapters 2 and 3 discussed some of the variety of outcomes researchers have tried to explain, and how some have differentially interpreted ‘success’ for participatory innovations. Policymakers, activists, participants and citizens are all desperate to know what makes political participation ‘successful’. In politics, success and failure are always contested concepts.