How are they deliberating? Perceptions and Conditions of the deliberative practices in the Brazilian Public Policy Conferences

This paper explains the effects of the deliberative dynamic in three different Brazilian Public Policy Conferences (BPPCs) that are analysed as a “talk centred” democratic innovations. Yet attentive to the discursive pluralism that surrounds the policy cycles related to each BPPC; this paper focuses only on their deliberative phase characterized as the moment throughout careful and respectfully considerations of the arguments pro and against policy alternatives are made before the participants make their decisions. The data were collected through qualitative and quantitative methods. The former provided the BPPCs institutional variables and the latter the opinion of 1066 BPPC’s participants about the institutional incentives and the discursive dynamics within the PPCs. The results show that the discursive process affected the decisions of the majority of them, but not all. Effects such as the ‘clarification of proposals’, the ‘reinforcement of proposals’, the ‘change of the proposals’ are explained through institutional, socioeconomic, and political variables.