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Can a political project exist outside of the power relations from which it is trying to emerge? In the twilight of Brazil's twenty-one year military regime, a new union movement emerged in São Paulo's industrial region, giving life to a new political party: the Workers' Party. The electoral success enjoyed by the party enabled it to champion a whole raft of democratic reforms and Brazil is now celebrated as a laboratory for popular and participatory forms of government. However, through analysis of the trajectory of the Worker Party's democratic experiment, the true challenge of embedding democracy inside existing state structures emerges.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, Victor Albert provides a critical analysis of citizen participation in Santo André, in the region of Greater São Paulo where the Workers' Party was founded, holding a microscope to the power relations between political appointees, public officials and local community activists. Albert also reveals how different social actors think and feel about citizen participation away from formal assemblies, and how some participants engage in what is a tenuous, and at times mutually distrustful, tactical and strategic relationship with political patrons.

Brazilian society has frequently been described as polarized during the country's recent political and economic crisis. In 2018, a wave of opposition to the centre-left Workers' Party culminated in the election of Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist who portrays the political left as a malevolent force in Brazilian society. In this paper I explore this polarization through drawing on ethnographic research with the Homeless Workers' Movement ( Movimento de Trablhadores Sem-Teto, MTST), a large urban social movement that develops settlements on underutilized land in the city, and a prominent civil society opponent of Bolsonaro. More specifically, I examine a key site of socio-spatial tension in São Paulo, Paulista Avenue, as a new political right came to predominate on the city's main thoroughfare during the campaign to impeach the Workers' Party President, Dilma Rousseff. I show how the perceived intolerance of the mobilized right helped to establish new normative codes that regulated the political symbolism which could be displayed in public spaces. Lastly, I consider how the vilification of the MTST in particular and the political left in general by the new right is embedded in broader structures of stigmatization.

Brazil's Movimento de Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST, Homeless Workers' Movement) has grown dramatically in recent years. This growth was partly provided for by the use of a large government housing programme, Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV, My House My Life), which allowed the MTST to construct housing for its members and swell its ranks with thousands of new members. Yet some have argued that the MCMV programme used by the MTST may compromise the autonomy of civil society organisations. This article, by contrast, argues that while the MCMV programme encouraged bureaucratic practices, it also helped to promote the cultural politics of the
MTST.

City master plans assumed a central role in urban planning in Brazil with the promulgation of a new constitution in 1988 and the passage of enacting legislation in 2001. Citizen participation became an important part of this new urban planning framework. In contrast to some of Brazil's other democratic experiments, participation in urban planning has been received critically or with only cautious optimism. A comparison of two participatory forums in Santo André, São Paulo, shows that established patterns of administrative power can decisively influence the participation of the public in city planning. Differences in the executive structures of the two institutions enabled one of them but not the other to foster open-ended deliberation on policies with members of disadvantaged groups. The study suggests that participation might be enhanced by reserving executive positions for civil society participants, including the public at all stages of policy development, choosing participants largely from disadvantaged groups, and keeping the forum small.Planos diretores para cidades desempenharam papel fundamental no planejamento urbano brasileiro com a promulgação da Constituição de 1988 e o sancionamento da legislação em 2001. Demais, a participação de cidadãos tornou-se importante elemento dessa nova moldura de planejamento urbanístico. Ainda assim, em contraste com outros experimentos democráticos no Brasil, a participação no planejamento urbano tem sido recebida de maneira crítica ou no máximo com otimismo cauteloso. Contudo, uma comparação entre dois forums participativos em Santo André, São Paulo, demonstra que padrões estabelecidos de poder administrativo tiveram influência decisiva na participação pública no planejamento urbano. Diferenças na estrutura executiva das duas instituições permitiram que uma delas, mas não a outra, promovesse deliberações transparentes sobre iniciativas enquanto permitia a participação de grupos menos privilegiados. O estudo sugere que a participação pode ser ampliada com a nomeação de participantes da sociedade civil a cargos executivos, incluindo-se o público em todos os estágios da política de desenvolvimento e escolhendo-se indivíduos majoritariamente entre segmentos mais desfavorecidos da população. O forum deve, ainda, manter-se pequeno.

Can a political project exist outside of the power relations from which it is trying to emerge? In the twilight of Brazil's twenty-one year military regime, a new union movement emerged in São Paulo's industrial region, giving life to a new political party: the Workers' Party. The electoral success enjoyed by the party enabled it to champion a whole raft of democratic reforms and Brazil is now celebrated as a laboratory for popular and participatory forms of government. However, through analysis of the trajectory of the Worker Party's democratic experiment, the true challenge of embedding democracy inside existing state structures emerges. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, Victor Albert provides a critical analysis of citizen participation in Santo André, in the region of Greater São Paulo where the Workers' Party was founded, holding a microscope to the power relations between political appointees, public officials and local community activists. Albert also reveals how different social actors think and feel about citizen participation away from formal assemblies, and how some participants engage in what is a tenuous, and at times mutually distrustful, tactical and strategic relationship with political patrons.

Self-Organized Publics in Mass Protests: An Introduction -- PART I: Dimensions of Protest Publics in the Recent Wave of Unrest -- Exploring Protest Publics: A New Conceptual Frame for Civil Participation Analysis -- Shoulder to Shoulder against Fascism: Publics in Gezi Protests -- Emergent Protest Publics in India and Bangladesh: A Comparative Study of Anti-Corruption and Shahbag Protests -- The Grammar of Protest Publics in Skopje, Macedonia, May 2015 -- Retracing Public Protest in Portugal: A Generation in Trouble -- Justification in Protest Publics: The Homeless Workers' Movement in Brazil's Crisis -- So Strong, Yet So Weak: The Emergence of Protest Publics in Iceland in the Wake of the Financial Crisis -- Five Stars of Change: The Transformation of Italian Protest Publics into a Movement Party through Grillo's Blog -- PART II: Protest Publics and Political Change in Different Political Regimes -- Cross-national Comparison of Protest Publics' Roles as Drivers of Change: from Clusters to Models -- Protesters as the "Challengers of the Status-Quo" in Embedded Democracies: The Cases of Iceland, the United Kingdom and the United States -- Protest Publics as the "Watchdogs" of the Quality of Democracy in Global South -- Protest Publics as the Triggers of Political Changes in Hybrid Regimes: The Cases of Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt -- Protest Publics as Democratic Innovators in an Authoritarian Environment -- The Transforming Role of Protest Publics in Processes of Sociopolitical Change in the Global South and Southern Europe: From Occasional Challengers to Institutionalized Watchdogs -- Conclusion: The Common Features and Different Roles of Protest Publics in Political Contestation