Participatory Opportunity and Collective Action: A Critical Reflection on Brazil's Recent Experiments in Democracy

This paper explores the effects of government sanctioned citizen participation on collective action in Brazil's recent history. It begins by tracing the demands for direct citizen participation in government affairs that were being made by popular movements that emerged in the 1970s. From there, it outlines the emergence and features of two of the most important participatory institutions of the democratic era—Participatory Policy Councils and Participatory Budgets—and theorises, with the assistance of insights from political opportunity theory, how these might alter forms of collective action. It argues that together with the decentralisation of the state, an institutional landscape was created that, while providing the conditions for direct democracy, also encouraged localised, less radical forms of collective action.