Brazil has been holding a particular position regarding the consolidation of participatory democratic devices of governance. The most well known of such devices, the participatory budget, has become a standard case study on the topic after being originally created in the city of Porto Alegre in 1989, and since then has been replicated all over the world, regardless the different levels of success it has achieved in each context. Since the Workers Party took hold of the Presidency in 2003, it has been applying in the national level the same programmatic participatory commitments that allowed its former administration in Porto Alegre to become worldwide known. Lula’s government has over its two subsequent periods in office been responsible for institutionalizing in the national level a participatory innovation that have been changing the way public policy is designed, implemented and monitored in Brazil: the national public policy conferences. Official data estimates that about five million people have participated in the 73 national policy conferences that took place in Brazil since 2003. These people are dispersed in all levels comprised by the conference process, that is the deliberation that starts in the local (municipal) or regional (aggregation of municipalities) levels, scales up to all the 27 states, and is completed in the national conference that is usually held in the capitol. This paper relies on empirical evidence from all the national public policy conferences held in Brazil since the redemocratization, and argue that such deliberative experiment has been successful enough to affect the policies drafted by the administration, to influence the legislation enacted by the Congress, and to broaden the political inclusion of minority groups.
