Autor/es
Descripción
ver mas
Colaborador
Pereyra, Sebastián
Materias
Spatial Coverage
Idioma
spa
Extent
275 p.
Derechos
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 2.0 Genérica (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Formato
application/pdf
Identificador
Cobertura
América Latina
Abstract
During the last decades, Latin American governments promoted different types of participatory and transparency initiatives. Direct democracy mechanisms; freedom of information laws; participatory councils; participatory budgeting experiences and anticorruption bodies are just some of the initiatives that have been spreading all across the region. Although the study of these initiatives has had a fruitful empirical and descriptive development of research —in quantitative as well as qualitative terms— most studies have focused on the analysis of the consequences of this type of policies and have focused on the subnational or local level. Few studies, however, have explained the causes of their emergence and have concentrated on the national or regional level. Therefore, this dissertation analyses different trajectories of “state-opening” in Latin America by looking at the causes that triggered governments to promote participatory and transparency initiatives from 1990 until 2016.
State-opening processes are understood from three different levels of analysis. Firstly, from a theoretical perspective, I resume the question of why governments would be interested in opening themselves and establishing institutions of political accountability when these institutions restrain them and limit their freedom of action. Therefore, I conceptually link the emergence of these initiatives with the different reasons that trigger governments to promote political accountability and I classify participatory and transparency initiatives according to their level of openness vis a vis government´ self restriction. Secondly, from a comparative and historical perspective, I reconstruct the origins and expansion of state-opening initiatives in eighteen Latin American countries. Thirdly, from an in depth case analysis, I reconstruct two different paths to technocratic State-opening: the Chilean and the Argentinean one. In order to do this, I focus mainly on the factors that drove governments to promote access to information initiatives. The main results of this thesis show the role played by international actors, advocacy networks and transnational communities of experts in the promotion of participatory and transparency initiatives in the region. In turn, this work proves how both factors interact with different domestic political opportunities structures (type of government, executive cabinet organization and cohesion of the ruling elite) causing alternative paths of state-opening. By challenging the dichotomy between a neoliberal and a radical democracy approach in which most of the literature has asserted the study of participatory and transparency initiatives, this thesis sheds light on important institutional and international factors that shape the emergence of participatory and transparency policies, therefore fostering as well, new interpretations of their consequences and results
State-opening processes are understood from three different levels of analysis. Firstly, from a theoretical perspective, I resume the question of why governments would be interested in opening themselves and establishing institutions of political accountability when these institutions restrain them and limit their freedom of action. Therefore, I conceptually link the emergence of these initiatives with the different reasons that trigger governments to promote political accountability and I classify participatory and transparency initiatives according to their level of openness vis a vis government´ self restriction. Secondly, from a comparative and historical perspective, I reconstruct the origins and expansion of state-opening initiatives in eighteen Latin American countries. Thirdly, from an in depth case analysis, I reconstruct two different paths to technocratic State-opening: the Chilean and the Argentinean one. In order to do this, I focus mainly on the factors that drove governments to promote access to information initiatives. The main results of this thesis show the role played by international actors, advocacy networks and transnational communities of experts in the promotion of participatory and transparency initiatives in the region. In turn, this work proves how both factors interact with different domestic political opportunities structures (type of government, executive cabinet organization and cohesion of the ruling elite) causing alternative paths of state-opening. By challenging the dichotomy between a neoliberal and a radical democracy approach in which most of the literature has asserted the study of participatory and transparency initiatives, this thesis sheds light on important institutional and international factors that shape the emergence of participatory and transparency policies, therefore fostering as well, new interpretations of their consequences and results
Título obtenido
Doctora de la Universidad de Buenos Aires en Ciencias Sociales
Institución otorgante
Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales