Os conselhos de Políticas Públicas Brasileiros: caminhos para uma democracia revigorada

Abstract

This work has as its theme the question of the role of public policy councils in the face of the Brazilian state, which takes extraordinary and growing importance from institutionalized democracy in the second half of the eighties of the last century. Beside the classical instruments of representative democracy, resurrected the last dictatorial period that shadowed the Republic, and other mechanisms of participatory democracy, instituted with the new constitutional order since 1988, the public policy councils begin to take in the current block potential individuals, which tend to qualify them as necessary decisively to political pluralism, guarantors of social and cultural diversity and also as agents of economic and social development. The debate about the quality of democracy experiences Brazil at the beginning of XXI century is essential to have clear the role of traditional representative systems - and the possible crisis that involves - and the possibility of complementarity with participatory mechanisms. The argument that unfolds in chapters that make up this work ranges from investigation of the nature of public policy councils, its etymology, its historical evolution at international level and particularly at the domestic level, its institutionalization, of its location in the face civil society and the state, its distinction with other civil society organizations and other state bodies, their composition, regulation and standardization, the debate on its recognition as a plural public spaces of debate around its transformation into possible deliberative spaces of citizenship, recognition as instruments of direct and participatory democracy, and finally, the debate about the possibility to revitalize the representative system, being the social capital of generators and potential agents of social and economic development, to assist it, specifically in conversion downtown democracy to high intensity.