Documento CIDOB América Latina; 21

In the late 1980s, several European and Latin American local governments began to introduce innovative citizen participation mechanisms into the agendas and formation of municipal public policies. Nevertheless, the causes that could explain this attempt at democratic innovation differ, in accordance with the behaviour of a fundamental variable: the political-institutional context. In this article, the author presents a detailed analysis of the importance of the political context and of its implications for the emergence of citizen participation and the resulting dynamics through the study of a particular case: the city of Buenos Aires. The article begins by briefly contextualising the implementation of decision and control mechanisms in local governments. In the second section, the author defines the variable of the institutional context as the explanatory factor for institutionalised participation. The third point analyses the behaviour of this variable in the case under study, and highlights its three main dimensions: type of local government, institutional configuration and degree of political decentralisation.

ISSN: 1697-7688 (print edition)
ISSN: 1697-8137 (online edition)

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