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MAMDANI-STYLE MAYORS SHOULD STUDY PERU’S DEMOCRACY EXPERIMENT  
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Jared Abbott, Stephanie McNulty
July 31, 2026
Jacobin
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_ Peru has been home to the world’s most ambitious experiments in
participatory democracy. American progressive and democratic socialist
mayors should look to them for both inspiration and warning. _

In experimenting with participatory democracy, Peru learned that
opening the door to participation is not enough; serious resources
must be invested in bringing more people through it. Socialist elected
officials like Zohran Mamdani should take note., Angela Weiss / AFP
via Getty Images

 

Zohran Mamdani’s tenure as New York City mayor has raised hopes
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invigorated, deeper form of democracy and posed a question facing
progressive mayors everywhere: how to translate the grassroots energy
that brings them to office into a sustained movement for change. In
our new book [[link removed]], The Power and
Perils of Participatory Democracy: Participatory Budgeting and
Democracy in Peru, we provide several answers to that question while
tempering both naive optimism and unnecessary cynicism.

Peru, as we document, might be “the most participatory place on
earth.” Since the return of democracy in the early 2000s, the
country has built thousands of participatory institutions at the local
and regional levels, engaging ordinary citizens in decisions ranging
from infrastructure spending to urban planning — not just a few
exemplary cities here and there but a nationally mandated system
across thousands of municipalities. We have spent two decades studying
it.

Our central finding will both hearten and humble today’s progressive
mayors: participatory democracy works, but not in the way its most
ambitious advocates have hoped.

The Power: Participatory Institutions Deliver

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
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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.

The Perils: What Can Go Wrong

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
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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
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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.

Local Innovations Can’t Save National Democracy

Acentral 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.

_JARED ABBOTT is a researcher at the Center for Working-Class Politics
and a contributor to __Jacobin__ and __Catalyst: A Journal of Theory
and Strategy__._

_STEPHANIE MCNULTY is a professor at Franklin & Marshall College. She
is the coauthor of the book __The Power and Perils of Participatory
Democracy__._

_JACOBIN is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine
is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a
web audience of over 3,000,000 a month._

_Subscribe to Jacobin_ [[link removed]]_ today, get
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* Peru
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* Politics
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* democracy
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* Latin America
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* Local Government
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* Zohran Mamdani
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