ABSTRACT

PT leaders drew a number of political lessons from their experiences in municipal governments. In this chapter I concentrate on the learning process of governability and their implications for the changing strategies of PT administrations from the early 1980s, when the party formed its first administrations, up until Lula assumed national executive public office in 2002. Most of the literature that explores PT municipal administrations focuses mainly on their participatory innovations, especially the Participatory Budget. 1 Here I use this literature and draw on additional sources to explain how many of these innovations were also an element of the PT governability strategy. It is my view in this book that the participatory strategies developed by the party at the sub-national level not only resulted from the ideological convictions of its leaders, but were also functional to a larger and more complex political game that helped a number of administrations to build political support, accommodate interests and, more important, help overcome the party’s minority status in legislative assemblies.