Introduction

In times of disenchantment with democracy and declining liberal freedoms around the world, political participation has become a key, puzzling concept. Since the third wave of democratisation, South American cities have innovated in furthering democracy (Baiocchi 2005), by both building participatory institutions (Goldfrank 2011; Pearce 2010; Wampler 2010) and through social protest (Álvarez et al. 2017; Angelcos and Rodríguez 2023; Rossi 2017). Yet Latin American cities are highly unequal, characterised by exclusion and marginality, casting a shadow over the legitimacy of contemporary democracy and the now decades-long experience with democratic innovation. To what extent does urban territorial inequality shape political participation? The papers in this section are oriented to developing a comparative understanding of how unequal urban territory shapes political participation. In each contribution, urban territory is understood as space organised for political purposes by different players within a city (Halvorsen 2019). Consistent with this conception of territory, political participation is defined as a situated process through which ordinary citizens seek to influence the outcomes of political institutions at any given state level (Brady 1999). This approach is open to different forms of political engagement, including electoral participation, involvement in participatory mechanisms promoted by the local state, or contentious activity in both the streets and the courts. Analysing political participation from this wide spectrum is a way to deal with the limitations of existing literature on citizen participation. First, there is a lack of theoretical dialogue between urban studies and political science approaches to democracy. As a result, urban studies tend to underestimate the influence that both political institutions and political parties have on citizens' participation. On the other hand, political science tends to underplay the relevance of urban territory to informing the ways in which political engagement develops. Secondly, qualitative studies usually focus on one organisation or repertoire of participation, often at a given (usually national or local) scale, losing the interaction between different players and how participatory practices travel across cities. Finally, there is a trend to focus on best-case examples of participatory innovations at the expense of the variety of empirical experiences. This section brings together three empirical studies that explore the evolving landscape of political participation at the neighbourhood scale in both Buenos Aires and Montevideo. By combining comparative and multi-scalar perspectives, these works illuminate the complex interplay between participation, representation and inequality in decentralised urban governance. The cities selected contrast in terms of political context and participatory experiences, whereas they share a similar geographical context as large and relatively developed yet unequal cities of the southern cone. Moreover, both cities have had a vibrant yet distinct recent history of political participation. The first contribution is titled Uneven Participation: Socio-Territorial Inequality and Political Participation in Buenos Aires. By comparing political practices in the richest and poorest neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires, this paper explores how socio-territorial inequalities shape political participation. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews, Rocío Annunziata and the guest editors of the section (Sam Halvorsen and Sebastián Mauro) identify stark contrasts in motivations, repertoires and government responses. The paper describes how, based on contrasting backgrounds, residents of the poorest neighbourhood have developed participatory practices in terms of resistance and the pursuit of change, whereas those in the wealthiest neighbourhood see their participation in terms of conservation of the urban heritage. Given each neighbourhood's centrality/distance with respect to the state, residents of the wealthiest neighbourhood can rely on institutional mechanisms—supported by informal influence networks—while those in the poorest neighbourhood have had to deploy a set of participatory strategies, alternating between contentious repertoires, clientelistic exchanges, participatory mechanisms and legal activism. In Representing by Getting Citizens to Participate: An Analysis of the Case of the Local Councillors (comuneros) in the City of Buenos Aires, Rocío Annunziata and Eliana Persky examine how local councillors in Buenos Aires use participatory strategies to build their representative roles, proposing that participation is not external to representation. Through qualitative research conducted between 2012 and 2023, the authors show two contrasting patterns of councillor practices according to their political alignment. On the one hand, councillors aligned with the ruling party promote resident participation through institutional channels, presenting themselves as responsive problem-solvers. On the other hand, opposition councillors often stage conflicts and promote collective activism, positioning themselves as advocates for neighbourhood struggles. These strategies are similar across different territories, although the demands are quite different depending on territorial inequalities. Finally, Martín Freigedo, Germán Bidegain, Fabricio Carneiro and Gonzalo Puig, in the paper Decentralisation in Montevideo: The Effects of Inequality and Party Mobilisation on Electoral Participation at the Territorial Level, address political participation in electoral terms. They compare turnout rates in two different institutions across Montevideo's neighbourhoods. Firstly, the conventional municipal elections, which are compulsory and involve political parties. Secondly, elections in councils—a community-based institution, opened to the voluntary participation of all the neighbourhood residents. The authors analyse how territorial inequality, institutional design and party mobilisation affect participation rates in both cases. Based on a quantitative analysis, the authors found that party mobilisation and institutional design, rather than territorial inequality, are key factors explaining the variation in turnout rates between and within both institutions. With the help of qualitative research, the authors address the relevance of political parties and suggest that they often co-opt participatory spaces, undermining their intended non-partisan and inclusive character. Together, these studies offer a nuanced account of political participation in two South American capital cities, highlighting the interplay between representation, urban space, institutional design and inequality. They invite readers to reconsider the boundaries between institutional and contentious politics, as well as between the state, political parties and citizens, and call for recognising the spatial and organisational factors that shape the possibilities and limits of democratic engagement in cities. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study

Democracy · Disenchantment · Gentrification · Legitimacy · Politics · Situated · Technocracy · Urban politics · Homelessness and Social Issues · Latin American and Latino Studies · Politics and Society in Latin America

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