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Rites of Participation: Popular Encounters and Democratic Ritual in Brazil  

 

Review by Joseph Jay Sosa 
 

The Limits to Citizen Power 

By Victor Albert 

Pluto Press, 2016 

 

 Political anthropologists and ethnographers often address the limits to citizen power, in terms of 

the material and symbolic barriers ordinary people encounter in their attempts to have a say in the rule 

of the state. Victor Albert's recent book, The Limits to Citizen Power: Participatory Entanglements and 

the State (Pluto Press) invites readers to consider the question from an additional perspective. Albert 

examines not just the limits to power, but the limits of citizenship, one that may be immanent to 

citizenship itself as a social form. Albert's ethnography of three different participatory democratic 

institutions in the Brazilian municipality of Santo André shows both the extrinsic and intrinsic factors 

for why these institutions premised on citizen access often fail to translate into citizen power. While 

noting the opposed interests of organized citizens versus representatives of the state (although these 

social roles become flexible in practice), Albert instead concentrates on the ritualized form under which 

citizen-state interactions take place. The result questions many of the ideological assumptions of 

unmediated spontaneity in democracy theory's traditional treatment of participation.  

 Participatory democracy has become quite a hot topic in political science and political 

anthropology of South America. While many variations exist in implementation, the basic supposition 

of participant democracy is that it multiplies citizens' points of access to decision making and gives 



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citizens an institutionalized form to co-craft public policy and governance in collaboration with state 

officials. Participatory institutions exist on a number of scales and in a variety of formats--from local 

participatory budgeting (PB) where neighborhood residents decide which development projects take 

priority to national councils (on women, youth, health, etc.) where social movement representatives 

review federal policy in a given area. In the 2000s, the so-called "Pink Tide" of leftist governments 

won presidential elections in South America. Many of those administrations set up participatory 

institutions in a variety of formats. The institutionalization of participatory democracy principles has 

not only changed mechanisms of governance; they have also contributed to a certain experimentalist 

ethos on the left. Ethnographers hailing from sociology, anthropology and political science have been 

keen to study the democratic procedures and political cultures that have emerged from these new 

institutions. But participatory democracy also has its critics, even those committed to the emancipatory 

and empowerment goals it presents. Some argue that participatory bodies become co-opted by the 

administrators who organize them, becoming a captured voice of the people. Others suggest that 

participatory institutions are an end-run around legislative practices. Thus, the general question framing 

most ethnographic studies of participant democracy have centered around whether participant 

democracy can live up to its promise to bring ordinary people into the state, or whether the will-to-

bureaucracy throughout liberal democracy and modern life more generally will ultimately undermine 

the participatory project?  

 Victor Albert's book fits well within this general question framing most scholarship on 

participatory democracy. Limit to Citizen Power interweaves the story of four different participatory 

"councils" in Santo André: the Housing Council (HC), Municipal Budget Council (MBC), Urban 

Development Council (UDC), and Welfare Management Council (WMC).  These four councils have 

different purviews and manage citizen input in different ways. Albert's observations, however, 

demonstrate how all the councils are concerned in one way or another with questions that continue to 



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vex the inherent paradoxes of how democracy is exercised in daily practice. He begins his analysis in 

the first chapter by contextualizing some of the tensions in participatory democracy historically, 

showing the paradoxical forces around PD that made it what it was. Chapters two, three, and four turn 

to participatory institutions as ritualized spaces of encounter. In his schematized reading of speaking 

orders, modes of address, the organization of bodies and architecture, Albert shows how decision-

making processes symbolically recapitulate the legitimatizing practices of representative democracy. 

Chapter five provides narratives from the participants themselves--both citizens and state 

representatives--on how they mediate conflicting ideas about the process. Titled "Backstage," chapter 

six offers a glimpse of various interactions outside of the participatory meetings themselves. In viewing 

these side conversations outside the primary ritualized sphere of action, Albert considers how other 

political forms, such as clientalism, also inform the participatory process.  

 The first chapter explores central paradoxes of participatory democracy in the context of 

broader historical factors in Brazil's democratization. Here the site of the councils, Santo André, 

becomes crucial to the narrative. Santo André, a 600,000 resident municipality in the greater São Paulo 

metropolitan area that occupies a special place in the Brazilian political imagination. The city was a site 

of a metal-workers' strikes in this region in 1978 that became a symbol of resistance to Brazil's military 

dictatorship and launched the career of strike leader Luis Inácio da Silva (Lula) on a trajectory that 

eventually included the Brazilian presidency. After the success of the strikes, Lula formed the Worker's 

Party (or PT) in 1982 (shortly after the dictatorship allowed a return to political parties). Envisioned as 

a "movement of movements" rather than solely a political party, the PT aggressively instituted 

participatory democracy institutions in municipalities after they won local election. Santo Andre had a 

progressive mayor, Celso Daniel, a martyr-like figure whose figure looms large in not only the history 

of participatory democracy but in the living memory of the politicians and citizens whom Albert 

interviews. Drawing on the Santo André municipal plans filed under the Daniel administration, Albert 



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reports on Daniel's ambivalent feelings towards the participatory institutions he helped create. Daniel, 

himself a member of the original generation of PT organizers and socialists, lamented that the citizens 

he wished to empower did not understand how participation worked. While PT activists like Daniel 

wanted to use participatory institutions to remake the structure of power, the citizens they brought into 

the process had more focused goals--using the process to make specific demands rather than broad 

governing changes. Albert, here, touches on a fascinating question: what is the disjuncture between the 

potential for structural change that the activist founders of participatory democracy envisioned, versus 

the often specific (and, to recall the title, limited) demands that citizens place on it? Placed within the 

history of Santo André, this question acquires an additional intimate layer of meaning as actors see 

themselves as continuing a line of democratic and populist tradition that extends to the fight for 

democracy in Brazil. This shared feeling in the importance and fragility of democracy appears in 

ethnographic accounts of citizenship throughout the Brazilianist literature, and Albert's interlocutors 

seem attentive to this as well.  

 Chapters two, three, and four focus on structural features of the participatory meetings 

themselves, showing how interactions construct not only the meaning but the efficacy and legitimacy 

of the participatory governance sessions. Albert borrows here on sociological insights on the institution, 

anthropological frameworks on ritual, as well as semiotic anthropology approaches to the interactions. 

Distinguishing his analysis from previous ethnographies that have treated elections and induction 

ceremonies as aspects of the participatory governance process secondary in comparison to demand 

making and negotiation, Albert shows how the physicality of the space creates a cosmology of the 

governance session itself.  In the description, Albert recounts ceremonial aspects of Brazilian meeting 

structures that will be familiar to any one who has sat through a government or even scholarly 

presentation.  In a close ritual analysis of the action of "composing the table," Albert offers an incisive 

reading of the political significance of seeming arcane formalities.  Composing the table consists of 



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inviting roundtable participants up to the table one by one, announcing their position and credentials. 

Albert's close reading of the honorifics applied (reminding the reader that the 'his excellence' title 

adjoining the names of even minor politicians symbolically recalls the imperial Portuguese tradition) 

shows how composing the table is truly performative act that instantiates state authority in a room so 

that constrains citizens' efficacy in exercising their power.  Other factors--from the architecture, to the 

scheduling, to the staging of bodies--collude to frame the interaction as one where the state frames the 

relationship it will have with its citizens.     

  The clinical eye applied to the meeting spaces contributes to the ethnographic approaches to 

participatory democratic institutions--as they tend to follow the experiences of a set of a cohort of 

participants. Focusing on ritualization, Albert hits upon the scripted sociality of participatory meetings 

that might not have been obvious had this simply been an account of competing interests. While initial 

ethnographic analyses tended to be overly laudatory of the process, subsequent analyses have focused 

on the ruses of citizen access, how such access is limited by bureaucracy, the competition of interests, 

etc.  These corrections to the initial wave of uncritical praise have been a welcome addition to the 

record, but they have been fairly uncreative in the way they have treated power.   

Scholars have mostly analyzed the flaws of participatory democratic institutions in terms of the 

possibility for subterfuge or cooptation. Such analyses show that no process is invulnerable to the 

manipulation of interested actors. Albert demonstrates plenty of this kind of external pressure on 

participatory institutions. The focus on the ritual of participation shows an additional set of limitations, 

this time not due to external pressures but to the immanent contradictions of symbolizing democratic 

power itself. This is the true limit of citizen power, that in cannot manifest itself in the abstract or in 

utopic unmediated fashion but rather it needs a form, a ritual to fashion it.  Will the cultural aspects of 

power itself undermine the prospect of radical democracy?  That is, ultimately as Albert documents, not 

just the limits to citizen’s power but the limits of power. 



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 In these middle chapters, the focus on the structure of the encounters makes Albert's 

ethnographic reportage appear removed from the people themselves, which is both a strength and 

weakness of his reading here. While Albert captures the unspoken rules that structure the encounter, his 

method misses what Brazilians call jeitinho––the clever and roguish ways in which rules can be 

negotiated. Surely, there are performative misfires in the ritual: people who speak out of turn, who roll 

their eyes at the pronouncements of the politicians attending, or in other ways resist the roles that the 

state carves out for them. Had Albert become more embedded with a particular group, he might have 

been pulled into the particular views of a subset of actors, privy to another set of motivations, 

interpretations that would have obscured the formal analysis of the social field that he schematizes. 

While he gets offhand comments from the crowd, describing chaotic meetings as farcical (palhaçada) 

and 'nonsense' or a mess (bagunça), what is missing is a sustained voice from within that crowd. A 

greater attention to the ideological, interpersonal disputes between supporters of Edu and Ronaldo in 

elections for citizen representative in chapter two, for instance, might have missed the fact that the 

election itself reinforces the legitimacy of the process regardless of who wins.  Yet Albert’s constant 

insistence on the procedural view risks an overly clinical gaze, where precisely what is missing from 

this ethnography of citizen politics are the citizens themselves.   

 The strength of Albert's study emerges over the course of the book to show how participatory 

democracy is layered into, shapes and is shaped by existing patterns and structures of institutionalized 

power. One of the central questions of the book: how to balance the participatory ethos of social 

democracy and the inefficiency of that model for the administration of developed life. This is not an 

abstract or suppositional question. The foundation of Brazilian grassroots activism (grupos de base) 

was centered on procuring resources from the state, such as water and resource collection.  Albert 

suggests that these infrastructure services, which propelled dispossessed people into politics and 

eventually participatory regimes, are precisely the kinds of projects that do not work well by 



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committee. Has Brazil's participatory turn generated its own conditions of ungovernability, and if so, 

are oppositional politics actually necessary within the participatory model? In exploring these 

questions, the author hits on one of the most important contradictions of a (post?) liberal society.  If 

liberalism offers citizens the promise of not having to care about politics (Berlant 2011), then does the 

demand to participate violate a norm of modern global life?  Might not caring also be part of the 

efficacy of administration?  Albert's analysis is, perhaps appropriately, ambivalent about these very 

provocative questions that he raises. After all, democratic public assemblies can have their 

determinations thwarted by an inefficient bureaucracy, by interfering elites, judicial prohibitions and 

complexities and so on. Yet, if citizens are not actively influencing the decisions and conduct of the 

public administration rather than merely being offered a formal opportunity to do so, then an ideally 

liberal bureaucracy and an ideally efficient administration cannot salvage their democratic promise.  

 

Bibliography 

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.  

 

Joseph Jay Sosa is assistant professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College. 

He is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on sexuality, statecraft, and public culture in São 

Paulo, Brazil. His current book project, Participatory Desires, examines how demands for LGBT 

political recognition in media, protests, and government institutions have served as a catalyst for 

broader shifts in Brazil’s ideological spectrum. 

 

 

© 2018 Joseph Jay Sosa 


