Deliberative Systems in Meso Perspective: The Subsystem of Policy Councils in the State of Minas Gerais

The paper makes a critical dialogue with the literature on deliberative systems which features an innovative suggestion to investigate deliberative arenas in their connections to other parts of the political system and society. Drawing on the work of Mansbridge and Parkinson (2012), a number of studies have been carried out in Brazil in order to learn systematically how the different deliberative arenas can connect to the Brazilian political system as a whole. The creation and operation of a broad range of Participatory Institutions (Avritzer, 2009) has made Brazil an important case study, which has attracted the attention of national and international researchers (Wampler, 2015). Despite the great theoretical advance of the aforementioned systemic model, we identified a gap on the potential "connectors" of this system. It means to say that, although the analytical model indicates the importance of thinking about arenas in the process of interaction between them, there is not explicitly an indication of the mechanisms that would work to keep "connected" the different arenas. Correspondingly to this theoretical gap, we identified another problem concerning to the adoption of effective methodologies to capture the interaction and mutual influence between the different deliberative arenas. These are present within the executive, legislative and judicial branches, as well as in civil society. The first section of this paper presents the theory of deliberative systems, their core conceptions and its critics. We highlight the main aspects of this analytical framework and provide our contribution proposing the approach of the subsystems in a dialogue with the literature that addresses the Participatory Institutions.. In the third section, we present our hypotesis and explicit our methodological choices. In the fourth section, we describe the subsystem features of state councils of Minas Gerais - Brazil. We conclude pointing out ways to push forward this research agenda.