As the year draws to a close, the time for retrospectives arrives. In this text, we present six reasons to read the article “Between deinstitutionalization and resilience: institutional participation in the Bolsonaro government,” published in 2024 and available in the INCT Participa Digital Library.
Award
In October of this year, the article won the first edition of the Charles Pessanha Award for Articles from the journal DADOS, one of the most prestigious in Brazil, in the category of Political Science or International Relations articles.
Collaboration
The article is written by Carla de Paiva Bezerra (Cebrap), Débora Rezende de Almeida (UnB), Adrian Gurza Lavalle (USP), and Monika Dowbor (UFRGS), all affiliated with INCT Participa and recognized figures in the field of participation studies. This collective construction through networks of researchers from different parts of the country has been a hallmark of INCT Participa.
Distinctiveness
The text presents a diagnosis that is at once comprehensive and nuanced regarding the measures of deinstitutionalization of participatory policies carried out over the four years of the Bolsonaro government. “We began to look more carefully,” explains Adrian Gurza Lavalle, “because part of the literature examined the outcome of these measures as one of total destruction, a scorched-earth scenario, sometimes diagnosing the failure of participatory institutions (PIs) developed throughout the 1990s and 2000s. We show that the effects of these measures vary across PIs and seek to explain why certain institutions are more resilient than others,” he adds.
Originality
The article examined 103 national collegiate bodies, many of them councils, “tracking the changes resulting from government measures between 2018 and 2022, which allowed us to create a database on the status of each one,” explains Carla Bezerra. The researchers then propose a typology of resilience—one of the article’s most original contributions—with four quadrants: vulnerable, resilient, fragile/embedded, and formal/inert, varying according to institutional design and the position of the collegiate bodies within their respective policy communities.
Contribution to the field
This extensive database, built using official gazettes, ministerial ordinances, and the Access to Information Law, is open for other researchers to conduct analyses and expand the dataset. This is significant because the field of participation studies lacked such a broad diagnosis of the variety of national collegiate bodies and their transformation during the Bolsonaro government, explains Débora Rezende.
Numbers
The article presents unprecedented data, notes Monika Dowbor, such as the finding that 30% of the existing national collegiate bodies remained active and without formal changes during the Bolsonaro government. The research also showed that, although all areas were affected, some were more impacted than others, such as the environment sector, with 5 out of 16 collegiate bodies revoked (31%), and the human rights sector, with 11 out of 24 councils experiencing changes in their functioning. Finally, the researchers found that councils created by law were far more likely to survive than those created by decree: 65% compared to 30%.
