Gianpaolo Baiocchi
Biographic Data
| ID | 82500 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gianpaolo Baiocchi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gianpaolo |
| FAMILY NAME | Baiocchi |
| SIGNATURE | BAIOCCHI G |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2862-7422 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 603 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Redistributive Majoritarianism: Urban Inequalities and the Struggle for Social Housing
What are the political considerations of who is included or excluded through eligibility thresholds? A long-standing policy debate is whether social policy should be “targeted” only for the neediest or instead be “universalist” by serving a broad-based constituency. As the persistent housing affordability problem deepens, such debates have come up in the emerging discussion of “social housing.” Social housing describes various housing types that …
Satisficing devices: Co-benefits in practice to decarbonize New York City's residential buildings
The Moral Work of Participation: Disillusio, Expertise, and Urban Planning Under Neoliberalism
Behind Gentrification’s Gloss
Policy and scholarly debates on gentrification have mainly focused on displacement or improvements to neighborhood amenities. Less attention has been paid to actively worsening conditions for residents who don’t leave and for whom poor housing conditions are a perverse consequence of gentrification. Mapping city data on apartment code violations, we find that substandard housing conditions are surprisingly concentrated in gentrifying areas and no…
A posteriori comparisons, repeated instances and urban policy mobilities: What ‘best practices’ leave behind
Urban studies scholars have engaged in a lively debate on how to reformat comparative methods in the face of critical scrutiny of the discipline’s purported universalism. We share the enthusiasm for a reformatted urban comparativism and, in this paper, we turn to the thorny and more pragmatic question of how to actually carry it out. While traditional comparisons in urban studies have sought to find variation among similar cases by selecting a pr…
Bootstrapping Democracy: Transforming Local Governance and Civil Society in Brazil
This book investigates participatory budgeting—a mainstay now of World Bank, UNDP, and USAID development programs—to ask whether its reforms truly make a difference in deepening democracy and empowering civil society.
The Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila
Radical Cities in Latin America: Past and Present
The Politics of Local Government: Governing in Small Towns and Suburbia
A Century of Councils: Participatory Budgeting and the Long History of Participation in Brazil
Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America
The contributors to Beyond Civil Society argue that the conventional distinction between civic and uncivic protest, and between activism in institutions and in the streets, does not accurately describe the complex interactions of forms and locations of activism characteristic of twenty-first-century Latin America. They show that most contemporary political activism in the region relies upon both confrontational collective action and civic partici…
What is political about political ethnography? On the context of discovery and the normalization of an emergent subfield
Cultural Sociology and Civil Society in a World of Flows: Recapturing Ambiguity, Hybridity, and the Political
This article "provincializes" cultural sociology and more specifically, the cultural sociology of politics and civil society. It first traces the origins of what is distinctive about the cultural sociology of civil society before discussing its three unspoken assumptions: the assumption of minimal stateness in the lives and worlds of social movements and civil society, the relation between civil and civilized, and the notion that the social locat…
Expert for a day: Theory and the tailored craft of ethnography1
Sociologists exhibit growing interest in the politics of expertise. Analyses of evaluations, economic paradigms, blueprints, censuses, policy instruments and the like have come to occupy an important position in recent research. While much of this emergent scholarship has drawn on historical methods, a growing number of scholars have turned to ethnography. A close reading of this work reveals that ethnographers have actively tailored rather than …
Controversies, Authority, and the Limits of Participation: Chicago's 49th Ward
This article analyzes an innovative, and relatively successful, experience in Chicago: its participatory budgeting (PB) process. Treating it as process-in-the-making, we are attentive to moments of uncertainty and controversy over the first year of its development. As a process of direct democracy, PB is profoundly ambiguous: it is, in principle, open to all, but it has no way to adjudicate between different ways of knowing and making claims by t…
Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation
Local participation is the new democratic imperative. In the United States, three-fourths of all cities have developed opportunities for citizen involvement in strategic planning. The World Bank has invested $85 billion over the last decade to support community participation worldwide. But even as these opportunities have become more popular, many contend that they have also become less connected to actual centers of power and the jurisdictions w…
Conflicts and paradoxes in the rhetoric of participation
The expansion of participation processes and techniques around the world in recent years takes place under the rhetoric of citizen empowerment. This rhetoric has been questioned by many scholars, who often point out the weak impact of such practices and the new games of domination to which participation is submitted. This article examines this dilemma from the expansion of participatory budgeting in the global North. We propose a study of assembl…
Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation
Employment and Development under Globalization: State and Economy in Brazil
Becoming a Best Practice: Neoliberalism and the Curious Case of Participatory Budgeting
Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation
Opportunities to “have your say,” “get involved,” and “join the conversation” are everywhere in public life. From crowdsourcing and town hall meetings to government experiments with social media, participatory politics increasingly seem like a revolutionary antidote to the decline of civic engagement and the thinning of the contemporary public sphere. Many argue that, with new technologies, flexible organizational cultures, and a supportive polic…
Participatory Budgeting as if Emancipation Mattered
Participatory Budgeting has by now been widely discussed, often celebrated, and is now instituted in at least 1,500 cities worldwide. Some of its central features-its structure of open meetings, its yearly cycle, and its combination of deliberation and representation-are by now well known. In this article, however, we critically reflect on its global travel and argue for more careful consideration of some of its less well-known features, namely t…
Politics as interruption: Rancière’s community of equals and governmentality
In this essay we explore Rancière's 'politics of equals' as an alternative conception of the political. Central to this conception is a division between instances of political contestation that address fundamental questions of equality ('the politics of equals') and those that are part of the management of the division of resources and positions in society ('the police'). This distinction provides a new way of thinking about theoretical and empir…
Actor-Network Theory and the ethnographic imagination: An exercise in translation
Disavowing Politics: Civic Engagement in an Era of Political Skepticism
Today, Americans are simultaneously skeptical of and engaged with political life. How does widespread cynicism affect the culture of civic participation? What are the implications for democracy? This study synthesizes data from a one-year collective ethnography of seven civic groups and theoretical work on boundary making, ambiguity, and role distancing. The authors find skepticism generates “disavowal of the political,” a cultural idiom that all…
Participation, Activism, and Politics: The Porto Alegre Experiment and Deliberative Democratic Theory
This paper examines civic governance in Porto Alegre in terms of deliberative democratic theory, as outlined in Cohen (1997), Fung (1998), and Wright and Fung (1999). Civic governance in Porto Alegre has developed in the ten years of the municipal administration of the Workers’ Party (P.T.) into a complex system of participatory fora where citizens decide and deliberate upon a variety of municipal policies. The cornerstone of the system is the mu…
Participatory Budgeting as if Emancipation Mattered
Participatory Budgeting has by now been widely discussed, often celebrated, and is now instituted in at least 1,500 cities worldwide. Some of its central features-its structure of open meetings, its yearly cycle, and its combination of deliberation and representation-are by now well known. In this article, however, we critically reflect on its global travel and argue for more careful consideration of some of its less well-known features, namely t…
Emergent Public Spheres: Talking Politics in Participatory Governance
This article addresses the question of whether and how participation in government promotes the conditions for participants to engage in the open-ended and public-minded discussion heralded by democratic theorists. Ethnographic evidence shows how participants in assemblies of the "participatory budget" in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, created open-ended and public-minded discussion in two of the city's poor districts. The urban poor of Latin …
Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation
Deliberative Democracy and Local Governance: Towards a New Agenda
Over the last decade scholars of urban governance and deliberative democracy have produced large literatures. Theorists of deliberative democracy have conceptualized the normative implications of 'deliberation' and explored real-world decision-making arrangements that approximate those ideals. Scholars of urban governance have theorized and explored the outcomes of different institutional arrangements for the governance of cities and regions. Whe…
Anything but racism: How sociologists limit the significance of racism
Actor-Network Theory and the ethnographic imagination: An exercise in translation
Disavowing Politics: Civic Engagement in an Era of Political Skepticism
Today, Americans are simultaneously skeptical of and engaged with political life. How does widespread cynicism affect the culture of civic participation? What are the implications for democracy? This study synthesizes data from a one-year collective ethnography of seven civic groups and theoretical work on boundary making, ambiguity, and role distancing. The authors find skepticism generates “disavowal of the political,” a cultural idiom that all…
Making Space for Civil Society: Institutional Reforms and Local Democracy in Brazil
This paper contributes to the growing body of research on participatory democracy and the literature on associational democracy by exploring the impact that institutional reforms have on local-level configurations of civil society. In the 1980s a wide range of participatory experiments were initiated in Brazil, most notably Participatory Budgeting in municipal governance. Municipios that adopted PB in principle devolve much or all of the decision…
A posteriori comparisons, repeated instances and urban policy mobilities: What ‘best practices’ leave behind
Urban studies scholars have engaged in a lively debate on how to reformat comparative methods in the face of critical scrutiny of the discipline’s purported universalism. We share the enthusiasm for a reformatted urban comparativism and, in this paper, we turn to the thorny and more pragmatic question of how to actually carry it out. While traditional comparisons in urban studies have sought to find variation among similar cases by selecting a pr…
The Ethnos in the Polis: Political Ethnography as a Mode of Inquiry
In the social sciences, there is renewed attention to political ethnography, a research method that is based on close‐up and real‐time observation of actors involved in political processes, at times even extending the definition of these processes to move beyond categories of state, civil society, and social movements. This article examines the emergence of political ethnography from a number of disciplinary locations, such as political science, …
What is political about political ethnography? On the context of discovery and the normalization of an emergent subfield
Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America
The contributors to Beyond Civil Society argue that the conventional distinction between civic and uncivic protest, and between activism in institutions and in the streets, does not accurately describe the complex interactions of forms and locations of activism characteristic of twenty-first-century Latin America. They show that most contemporary political activism in the region relies upon both confrontational collective action and civic partici…
Conflicts and paradoxes in the rhetoric of participation
The expansion of participation processes and techniques around the world in recent years takes place under the rhetoric of citizen empowerment. This rhetoric has been questioned by many scholars, who often point out the weak impact of such practices and the new games of domination to which participation is submitted. This article examines this dilemma from the expansion of participatory budgeting in the global North. We propose a study of assembl…
Interrogating Connections: From Public Criticisms to Critical Publics in Burawoy's Public Sociology
Co-designing and Co-teaching Graduate Qualitative Methods: An Innovative Ethnographic Workshop Model
This article describes an innovative collaboration between graduate students and a faculty member to co-design and co-teach a graduate-level workshop-style qualitative methods course. The goal of co-designing and co-teaching the course was to involve advanced graduate students in all aspects of designing a syllabus and leading class discussions in a required course for first-year graduate students. The authors describe the multiple stages involve…
The Civilizing Force of Social Movements: Corporate and Liberal Codes in Brazil's Public Sphere
Analysts of political culture within the 'civil religion' tradition have generally assumed that discourse in civil society is structured by a single set of enduring codes based on liberal traditions that actors draw upon to resolve crises. Based on two case studies of national crises and debate in Brazil during its transition to democracy, I challenge this assumption by demonstrating that not only do actors draw upon two distinct but interrelated…
The Politics of Habitus: Publics, Blackness, and Community Activism in Salvador, Brazil
Expert for a day: Theory and the tailored craft of ethnography1
Sociologists exhibit growing interest in the politics of expertise. Analyses of evaluations, economic paradigms, blueprints, censuses, policy instruments and the like have come to occupy an important position in recent research. While much of this emergent scholarship has drawn on historical methods, a growing number of scholars have turned to ethnography. A close reading of this work reveals that ethnographers have actively tailored rather than …
Cultural Sociology and Civil Society in a World of Flows: Recapturing Ambiguity, Hybridity, and the Political
This article "provincializes" cultural sociology and more specifically, the cultural sociology of politics and civil society. It first traces the origins of what is distinctive about the cultural sociology of civil society before discussing its three unspoken assumptions: the assumption of minimal stateness in the lives and worlds of social movements and civil society, the relation between civil and civilized, and the notion that the social locat…
Controversies, Authority, and the Limits of Participation: Chicago's 49th Ward
This article analyzes an innovative, and relatively successful, experience in Chicago: its participatory budgeting (PB) process. Treating it as process-in-the-making, we are attentive to moments of uncertainty and controversy over the first year of its development. As a process of direct democracy, PB is profoundly ambiguous: it is, in principle, open to all, but it has no way to adjudicate between different ways of knowing and making claims by t…
Could Participatory Budgeting Work in the United States
Research Article| January 01 2007 Could Participatory Budgeting Work in the United States? Gianpaolo Baiocchi; Gianpaolo Baiocchi Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Josh Lerner Josh Lerner Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Good Society (2007) 16 (1): 8–13. https://doi.org/10.2307/20711245 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Josh Lerner; C…
The Party and the Multitude: Brazils Workers Party (PT) and the Challenges of Building a Just Social Order in a Globalizing Context
What is the role of Brazil s Workers Party (PT) in its sponsorship of the World Social Forum, and what is the signi?cance of this relationship to the struggles to build a more just social order? Some have criticized the pres-ence of the PT in the Forum, juxtaposing its partisan motives to the democratic impulses of the multitude. This article challenges this reading by tracing the development of the PT in the last decade, bringing to light the wa…
Politics as interruption: Rancière’s community of equals and governmentality
In this essay we explore Rancière's 'politics of equals' as an alternative conception of the political. Central to this conception is a division between instances of political contestation that address fundamental questions of equality ('the politics of equals') and those that are part of the management of the division of resources and positions in society ('the police'). This distinction provides a new way of thinking about theoretical and empir…
Transparency in Global Change: The Vanguard of the Open Society
Brazilian cities in the nineties and beyond: New urban dystopias and utopias
Anything but racism: How sociologists limit the significance of racism
Participation, Activism, and Politics: The Porto Alegre Experiment and Deliberative Democratic Theory
This paper examines civic governance in Porto Alegre in terms of deliberative democratic theory, as outlined in Cohen (1997), Fung (1998), and Wright and Fung (1999). Civic governance in Porto Alegre has developed in the ten years of the municipal administration of the Workers’ Party (P.T.) into a complex system of participatory fora where citizens decide and deliberate upon a variety of municipal policies. The cornerstone of the system is the mu…
Media Coverage of 9-11 in Brazil
Understanding Mainland Puerto Rican Poverty
Preface Part I: Viewing Puerto Ricans as Hispanic 1. Hispanics in the United States 2. The Journeys of Mexicans and Cubans 3. The Puerto Rican journey 4. How the Journeys End Part II: Viewing Puerto Ricans Across the United States 5. How Puerto Ricans Fore from Place to Place 6. Infernal Migration, A Response? 7. How Segregation Fits In 8. Puerto Rican Women and the Labor Force Part III: Viewing Puerto Ricans Within the US. Economic Structure 9. …
Emergent Public Spheres: Talking Politics in Participatory Governance
This article addresses the question of whether and how participation in government promotes the conditions for participants to engage in the open-ended and public-minded discussion heralded by democratic theorists. Ethnographic evidence shows how participants in assemblies of the "participatory budget" in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, created open-ended and public-minded discussion in two of the city's poor districts. The urban poor of Latin …
The Party and the Multitude: Brazils Workers Party (PT) and the Challenges of Building a Just Social Order in a Globalizing Context
What is the role of Brazil s Workers Party (PT) in its sponsorship of the World Social Forum, and what is the signi?cance of this relationship to the struggles to build a more just social order? Some have criticized the pres-ence of the PT in the Forum, juxtaposing its partisan motives to the democratic impulses of the multitude. This article challenges this reading by tracing the development of the PT in the last decade, bringing to light the wa…
Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre
Brazil’s democracy has frequently been described as unconsolidated, its citizens as apathetic and uninterested in politics. But in Porto Alegre, a host city to the World Social Forum, thousands of ordinary citizens participate in local governance, making binding decisions on urban policy on a daily basis. While there has been immense attention paid to the practice of participatory democracy in Porto Alegre, this is the first book to examine the p…
The road not (yet?) taken: The Workers' Party (PT) in national power in Brazil
It is an accepted fact that Lula's national victory in Brazil's presidential elections of October of 2002 marked a turning point for Brazilian democracy. The election of a militant labor leader and political prisoner of humble origins was in many ways unprecedented and was met with great expectation, especially from the country's poor majority who helped propel one of their own to power. For PT activists this marked the end of a long quest for na…
Interrogating Connections: From Public Criticisms to Critical Publics in Burawoy's Public Sociology
Deliberative Democracy and Local Governance: Towards a New Agenda
Over the last decade scholars of urban governance and deliberative democracy have produced large literatures. Theorists of deliberative democracy have conceptualized the normative implications of 'deliberation' and explored real-world decision-making arrangements that approximate those ideals. Scholars of urban governance have theorized and explored the outcomes of different institutional arrangements for the governance of cities and regions. Whe…
The Civilizing Force of Social Movements: Corporate and Liberal Codes in Brazil's Public Sphere
Analysts of political culture within the 'civil religion' tradition have generally assumed that discourse in civil society is structured by a single set of enduring codes based on liberal traditions that actors draw upon to resolve crises. Based on two case studies of national crises and debate in Brazil during its transition to democracy, I challenge this assumption by demonstrating that not only do actors draw upon two distinct but interrelated…
Anything but Racism: How Sociologists Limit the Significance of Racism
Could Participatory Budgeting Work in the United States
Research Article| January 01 2007 Could Participatory Budgeting Work in the United States? Gianpaolo Baiocchi; Gianpaolo Baiocchi Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Josh Lerner Josh Lerner Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Good Society (2007) 16 (1): 8–13. https://doi.org/10.2307/20711245 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Josh Lerner; C…
Transparency in Global Change: The Vanguard of the Open Society
The Ethnos in the Polis: Political Ethnography as a Mode of Inquiry
In the social sciences, there is renewed attention to political ethnography, a research method that is based on close‐up and real‐time observation of actors involved in political processes, at times even extending the definition of these processes to move beyond categories of state, civil society, and social movements. This article examines the emergence of political ethnography from a number of disciplinary locations, such as political science, …
Making Space for Civil Society: Institutional Reforms and Local Democracy in Brazil
This paper contributes to the growing body of research on participatory democracy and the literature on associational democracy by exploring the impact that institutional reforms have on local-level configurations of civil society. In the 1980s a wide range of participatory experiments were initiated in Brazil, most notably Participatory Budgeting in municipal governance. Municipios that adopted PB in principle devolve much or all of the decision…
Cities as New Spaces for Citizenship Claims: Globalization, Urban Politics, and Civil Society in Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa in the 1990s
Introduction If the 1980s were widely considered a “lost decade” for some parts of the developing world, a retrospective look at the 1990s finds much less consensus in the literature. Scholars looking to the global South find contradictory patterns of economic globalization, the deregulation and liberalization of national economies, the decentralization of national states, and tentative steps toward democratic consolidation. Particularly conteste…
The Politics of Habitus: Publics, Blackness, and Community Activism in Salvador, Brazil
The Power of Ambiguity: How Participatory Budgeting Travels the Globe
From its inception in Brazil in the late 1980s, Participatory Budgeting has now been instituted in over 1500 cities worldwide. This paper discusses what actually travels under the name of Participatory Budgeting. We rely on science studies for a fundamental insight: it is not enough to simply speak of “diffusion” while forgetting the way that the circulation and translation of an idea fundamentally transform it (Latour 1987). In this case, the tr…
Co-designing and Co-teaching Graduate Qualitative Methods: An Innovative Ethnographic Workshop Model
This article describes an innovative collaboration between graduate students and a faculty member to co-design and co-teach a graduate-level workshop-style qualitative methods course. The goal of co-designing and co-teaching the course was to involve advanced graduate students in all aspects of designing a syllabus and leading class discussions in a required course for first-year graduate students. The authors describe the multiple stages involve…
Politics as interruption: Rancière’s community of equals and governmentality
In this essay we explore Rancière's 'politics of equals' as an alternative conception of the political. Central to this conception is a division between instances of political contestation that address fundamental questions of equality ('the politics of equals') and those that are part of the management of the division of resources and positions in society ('the police'). This distinction provides a new way of thinking about theoretical and empir…
Actor-Network Theory and the ethnographic imagination: An exercise in translation
Disavowing Politics: Civic Engagement in an Era of Political Skepticism
Today, Americans are simultaneously skeptical of and engaged with political life. How does widespread cynicism affect the culture of civic participation? What are the implications for democracy? This study synthesizes data from a one-year collective ethnography of seven civic groups and theoretical work on boundary making, ambiguity, and role distancing. The authors find skepticism generates “disavowal of the political,” a cultural idiom that all…
Participatory Budgeting as if Emancipation Mattered
Participatory Budgeting has by now been widely discussed, often celebrated, and is now instituted in at least 1,500 cities worldwide. Some of its central features-its structure of open meetings, its yearly cycle, and its combination of deliberation and representation-are by now well known. In this article, however, we critically reflect on its global travel and argue for more careful consideration of some of its less well-known features, namely t…
Political science (39 works) · Law (33 works) · Sociology (33 works) · Politics (26 works) · Law (19 works) · Democracy (14 works) · Economics (10 works) · Public Administration (10 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (10 works) · Anthropology (9 works)