Democratic Innovations and Increase in the Quality of Democracy in Brazil: The Experience of the Digital Participatory Budgets in Belo Horizonte and Recife

The aim of this paper is twofold: firstly, to characterize the experiences of participatory budgets in some Brazilian cities as "democratic innovations" by presenting the characteristics of increased power given to citizens and the production of democratic goods mentioned by Graham Smith in his work. Secondly, we will seek to demonstrate how these innovations contributed to introduce virtual and incremental democratic improvements in the quality of democracy in Brazil, by increasing the rates of participation and creating virtual deliberation spaces that were effectively used by the citizens in these cities, thus contributing to the production of decisions closer to the demands of the citizens. In addition, the experiences of virtual participatory budgeting in Brazil add value in relation to the previous face-to-face experiences by incorporating large contingents of the population in the budget-drawing process, from which they were previously excluded or did not participate in the process.