Deliberative democracy has grown into an influential normative paradigm for political theory and reform programs alike, but doubts persist about its desirability in a world where strategic action and inequality are prevalent. This problem has spurred efforts to understand the empirical dynamics of power relations in institutionalized participation. This article argues that sociolegal scholarship has yet to join this turn to power but that doing so can help it to specify law’s causal and normative relevance in deliberative governance. This is because the legal environment within which actors interact affects causal mechanisms by distributing opportunities for the exercise of power between potential participants, actual participants, and participants and government. The utility of a power-distributional perspective is illustrated through a study of São Paulo’s health councils, one of the world’s largest experiments in deliberative governance. The study demonstrates that the councils’ trajectory and current functioning—including some of their normatively problematic aspects—cannot be understood without reference to legal arrangements. This article is meant as a building block for sociolegal scholarship to continue investigating deliberation.

No abstract

Historical institutionalism has fruitfully moved beyond its initial focus on institutional effects to incorporate change. I argue, however, that the resulting advances have become misaligned with their conceptual bases. “Institutions as rules” was a useful first approximation, but it cannot accommodate changes in institutionalized practices occurring while sources of law remain the same. I propose reconceiving legal rules (material objects) and institutions (behavioral dispositions) as distinct elements that nonetheless remain fundamentally associated through the belief-shaping actions of specific groups. While rules change with the introduction of officially recognized materials, legal institutions change in response to new beliefs regarding what could pass as officially permissible. Far from a mere exercise in conceptual precision, the proposals draw distinctions that matter for description and explanation. In that regard, I show how the current literature mischaracterizes court-led change and how we might advance on the underexplored issue of collective meaning-making amidst unequal legal expertise.

O artigo busca mapear e criticar os arranjos jurídico-institucionais que constituem conselhos gestores das supervisões técnicas de saúde do município de São Paulo. Os conselhos compõem a "ecologia" de instituições participativas brasileiras, as quais se proliferaram no regime pós-redemocratização. De um ponto de vista teórico, parte-se do pressuposto de que escolhas jurídicas desempenham um papel constitutivo nessas instituições, impactando as condições reais de legitimidade de seus processos de deliberação. Nessa perspectiva, as regras formais e informais dos conselhos são reconstituídas e avaliadas com base nos critérios normativos da teoria democrática deliberativa. A participação na gestão da saúde em São Paulo representa um caso paradigmático no país, tendo em vista seu processo de formação anterior à redemocratização e sua configuração institucional descentralizada. Ainda assim, são detectadas três situações nas quais as escolhas jurídicas vigentes debilitam suas capacidades. Por fim, sugiro um “método” de aprimoramento institucional baseado na literatura da “governança experimentalista”.

No abstract