Our empirical verdict is clear: participatory budgeting and related institutions demonstrably improve local democratic life even when they face severe structural headwinds. Peru’s participatory institutions increased civic engagement, improved government responsiveness, and measurably improved citizen well-being. These aren’t trivial accomplishments.

Legal mandates matter a great deal. When participatory processes are properly resourced, sustained, and embedded into annual budget cycles, citizens engage more often and governments respond more meaningfully to citizen input, leading to both better lives and stronger democracy.

This speaks directly to a challenge every progressive mayor faces. The famous Porto Alegre participatory budgeting process — for decades considered the global gold standard for successful municipal participatory democracy — was eventually dismantled when a hostile mayor came to power and simply ended it. This is a central vulnerability of participatory governance: its strength depends on a committed executive, but when that leadership disappears, even the most committed activism to defend participatory democracy may not be enough to save it. Peru’s answer was to embed participation in national law, giving it both reach and longevity, if also limiting the program’s vigor and dynamism.

We also document a dynamic that should encourage progressive mayors: participation begets more participation. Citizens who engage in participatory budgeting become more civically active overall, and civil society organizations grow denser and more capable where participatory institutions are stronger. Engagement in one arena spills over into others, building the kind of organized citizenry that makes a progressive administration more powerful over time.

We are equally unflinching about the failures of participatory democracy. Peru’s participatory institutions have been deeply uneven in their quality, and our research catalogs their common pathologies: burdensome registration requirements that exclude poor and underrepresented communities; limited outreach that lets the same organized groups control the process; poorly facilitated meetings where a small handful of speakers crowd everyone else out of the discussion; and a disconnect between what citizens prioritize through the process and local governments’ ultimate spending decisions.

These failures have direct implications for cities in the United States run by even the most well-meaning progressives. People are tired and skeptical of endless “listening sessions.” Participation without binding consequences, without transparency, and without deliberate efforts to bring in a wide range of voices that are generally left out of the conversation serves more to demoralize than to mobilize.

Our findings on representation are particularly sobering. Without explicit rules prioritizing groups traditionally shut out of political decision-making, participatory institutions tend to reproduce existing inequalities. Opening the door to participation is not enough; governments must invest serious resources in bringing more people through it.

The most important design lesson is about integration. Gianpaolo Baiocchi, who studies participatory democracy across Latin America and Europe, and served on Mamdani’s transition committee, has argued that participatory processes deliver only when connected to real institutional decisions, and when assemblies hold genuine power over budgets and services rather than running alongside government as symbolic consultation.

Our work on Peru’s participatory budgeting confirms Baiocchi’s insights. Peru’s participatory processes were never meaningfully integrated into broader, long-term municipal planning, nor scaled up to link local participation with regional and national decision-making, as a range of experiments under Brazil’s Workers’ Party showed was possible. And mobilization efforts fell woefully short: limited outreach let the same organized groups dominate; low awareness kept most citizens in the dark about the process; and the deliberative process reproduced the inequalities it was meant to overcome.

A central argument in our book concerns what we call Peru’s democratic paradox. Despite two decades of locally impactful participatory institutions, Peru remains one of Latin America’s most unstable democracies, with nine presidents in a decade — four of them since late 2025 alone — a newly inaugurated right-wing president whose father ruled the country as a dictator and died a convicted human rights criminal, and alarmingly low public support for democracy as a political system. Local participatory democracy has produced genuine improvements even as democracy at the national level is fraying.

Our conclusion is clear: participatory institutions can strengthen local democracy, but they cannot substitute for healthy national political institutions or reverse democratic backsliding driven by corruption and concentrated elite power.

Local democratic innovation must be pursued simultaneously with, not instead of, the harder work of building durable political organizations and winning power at higher levels. Mamdani’s New York is a powerful example, but its success will depend not just on how well his administration governs the city, but on whether the movement that brought him to power continues to grow. Local participatory democracy can be a training ground and power base for that larger project, but it can’t replace it.

Our two decades of research on participatory democracy in Peru have produced a detailed account of what works, what fails, and why. Participatory institutions can improve the quality of democracy, improve people’s lives, and build the organized citizenry that sustains a progressive administration through hostile conditions, but only when they are well designed, adequately resourced, and genuinely integrated into government decision-making. The hard lessons learned in Peru are ones progressive mayors elsewhere would do well to learn before they repeat them.