Varieties of participatory institutions and interest intermediation

Although participatory institutions have become ubiquitous in contemporary politics, they often serve such different objectives that viewing the institutions as part of the same phenomenon can produce more confusion than clarity. We argue that participatory institutions can serve distinct and even opposite functions in interest intermediation, and develop a conceptual framework that distinguishes participatory institutions based on 1) what political project they were established to advance, 2) whose participation is channeled into these venues, and 3) how participatory institutions engage participants in the policymaking. We illustrate this framework with cases from Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, and Ecuador. We show that participatory institutions can serve a wide array of political projects that connect citizens to the state in radically different ways, including restructuring state-society relations to empower marginalized groups, increasing civil society influence over policymaking and government oversight, expanding parties’ electoral coalitions, and constraining the influence of disruptive social movements.