Origins and contradictions of the institutional citizen participation: Analysis of the experiences of Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Barcelona and Zurich

Since the decade of the eighty's, the municipality has becomes the principle promoter of the 'participative democracy' giving rise to a great interest in academic circles. Nonetheless, in spite of the existent literature, there are open questions on the conditions that permit its origin and molds its scope: In what way does a participative democracy allow citizens to take part in decision making? Under what conditions do the new institutions of participation increase the citizen's power or, on the contrary, are they trapped under the control of the political parties and or governments? With the intention of contributing to this debate, the article proposes a classification of an institutional citizen's participation (PCI); it presents a model for analysis that accounts for the conditioning relation of the political context on the definition of PCI, and analyses the experiences of Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Barcelona and Zurich, in drawing conclusions.