The Limits to Citizen Power: Participatory Democracy and the Entanglements of the State: Anthropology, Culture & Society

Today, Brazil is celebrated as a laboratory for popular, participatory forms of government. However, no political project can exist entirely outside the power relations from which it emerges. Participatory Democracy and the Entanglements of the State offers a fascinating window into the power relations between political appointees, public officials, and local community activists in a Brazil still emerging from its autocratic past. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, Victor Albert provides a critical analysis of citizen participation in Santo André, in the region of Greater São Paulo, where the Workers’ Party was founded. He explores the challenges participants face as they take part in institutions pervaded by the administrative culture of the state and how some participants engage in what is a tenuous, and at times mutually distrustful, tactical and strategic relationship with political patrons.