Participative Budget in Latin America: Complement or Subordination to the Representative Democracy?

The core of this paper is doing a review of the principal studies realized about the participative budget in Latin America, and specifically to establish some questions for future researches about it. The hypothesis that is supported is that current researches around the participative budget are not dedicated to explaining its kindness and origin, but rather they are orientated to solve the conditions in which this institution of the participative democracy is a complement to the institutions of the representative democracy. It is confirmed in the different national and local cases, which the way towards a regional or national institutions of the participative budget, is prevented by a hegemony of the representative democracy that prevails in the State institutions in this region. In this work, three groups of studies are identified with the participative budget in Latin America. One group is called studies of the first generation, which emphasize fundamentally the kindness and virtues of the participative budget from the Brazilian experience. The studies of the second generation identify the institutional design and the methodology that has determined the development of the participative budget in Latin America. Finally, there are studies of third generation, which take as an area of attention the links that take place between the participative budgets and the institutions of the representative democracy. The principal conclusion is that the evidence showed by some researches indicates that the participative budget is not a local complement to the representative democracy, but rather, this is an expression that democracy does not overcome micro-local spaces. The methodology used to elaborate this article was a documentary review of the literature on the participative budget in Latin America, and it was realized in the framework of the Fondecyt research carried out by the author.