Democratic Innovations and Citizen Participation in Latin America

Date: 

Tuesday, October 24, 2017, 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South, S250, 1730 Cambridge Street

Speaker: Thamy Pogrebinschi,  Democracy Visiting Fellow Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation,  Harvard Kennedy School 

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While Latin America consistently scores badly in most assessments of democracy it has been celebrated by many as a laboratory of citizen participation and institutional innovation. But except for the participatory budgeting there is very little information on the diversity of new institutional designs for citizen participation created in the region and even less on their impact on democracy. Drawing on a new database that comprises over 2 400 cases of democratic innovations in 18 countries this presentation will explore questions related to the context institutional design and impact of citizen participation in Latin America.

Thamy Pogrebinschi is currently a Democracy Visiting Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is a senior researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and faculty member of the Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences at the Humboldt University Berlin. She is the Coordinator of the LatInno Project which collects and assess new institutional designs for citizen participation in 18 countries of Latin America. Her research on participatory governance in Latin America has been published in journals like European Journal of Political Research Comparative Politics and Critical Policy Studies in addition to over a dozen of chapters in edited volumes. Her work on political theory comprises six books and over two dozen of articles and book chapters published in her native country Brazil.