A Letter From Brazil: Where a Great Democracy Invention Is Making a Comeback

A Senator Reflects on the Birth, Decline, and Coming Resurgence of Participatory Budgeting

What are the obstacles and opportunities facing democracy today? Zócalo is publishing a series of letters to highlight how the world’s democratic ideals are faring in practice. From Brazil: Senator Humberto Costa writes about the efforts to re-mobilize one of his nation’s signature democratic ideas: participatory budgeting.

One of the world’s great democratic innovations is about to make a big comeback in the place where it was invented: my country, Brazil.

And the story of that innovation’s rise, fall, and revitalization offers lessons for the world.

Participatory budgeting was a creation of Brazil, first …

by Humberto Costa | April 19, 2023

California’s Recall Is Riding a Global Wave

From Nigeria to Brazil, Democracies Are Experimenting With New Ways for People to Hold Their Elected Officials Accountable

by Joe Mathews | August 3, 2021

The recall attempt against Gov. Gavin Newsom is being widely—and wrongly—dismissed as a peculiar and illegitimate consequence of California’s strange direct democracy.

The truth is that the recall is very much …

A Turn-of-the-Century ‘Vaccine Revolt’ in Brazil Carries Seeds of Today

Anti-Science Arguments, Mistrust of Public Health, and Fake News Incited the 1904 Uprising Against Mandatory Smallpox Immunization

by Raphael Tsavkko Garcia | February 10, 2021

On November 9, 1904, the Brazilian newspaper A Notícia published the government’s vaccination plan against smallpox.

The following day, the so-called Vaccine Revolt began in Rio de Janeiro, then the country’s …

The Forgotten History of Brazil’s Concentration Camps

In the Early 20th Century, Authorities Hid Thousands of Impoverished Rural People Trying to Escape Drought

by Raphael Tsavkko Garcia | August 24, 2020

This is an excerpt from Brazilian social critic and novelist Rachel de Queiroz’s first book Os Quinze. Published in 1930 and later translated in English as The Fifteen, it refers …

A Letter From São Paulo, Where the Definition of ‘Unbearable’ Has Shifted

As Brazil’s Death Count Rises, a Writer of Fantasies Embraces Realism in Quarantine

by Sabina Anzuategui | May 27, 2020

I’ve been training myself to be productive at home since I finished high school. The very idea of becoming a writer came from an interview with Patricia Highsmith that I …

If You Want to Rule Brazil, Draw Power from the Streets

In a Country with Too Few Democratic Tools, Mass Protests Can Make or Break a Government

By Marcos Troyjo | March 1, 2017

Last August, Brazil’s leftist President Dilma Rousseff was forced to step down from office after the nation’s senate voted to impeach her. But Rousseff’s true downfall came months earlier, when …

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