In January 2003 Lula assumed office as President of Brazil, and for the first time the Workers' Party (PT) took control of the federal government. Radicals in Power provides a uniquely rich and systematically comparative account of the innovative policies at state level, and in big and medium-sized cities, which the PT has introduced over the past 20 years. Based on original field investigation, and authored by scholars and those who have been actual participants in the process, this volume provides a unique body of information and understanding of the ways in which a non-dogmatic leftwing political movement has instituted a highly innovative set of experiments (the most famous example being Porto Alegre) to involve ordinary citizens, especially the socially disadvantaged, in the local policy choices and fiscal allocation decisions which affect their lives, as well as a variety of other experiments to achieve both participation and social redistribution and justice.

The obstacles are many, as this volume makes clear, and there have been both failures and electoral setbacks. But at a time when conventional representative democratic institutions command less and less enthusiasm (as seen in declining voter turnouts in most countries), the PT's innovative experiments with new forms of participatory decisionmaking have a potentially huge significance for the renewal of the substance of democratic government worldwide. Here is a left-oriented, but non-dogmatic, political movement, now in power nationally, refusing simply to try and manage humanely a neoliberal, market-dominated economy, but instead experimenting with imaginative new ways of achieving redistribution and social justice in a non-revolutionary manner. Little wonder that political parties and city administrations elsewhere in Latin America and further afield are flocking to Brazil to learn from these extraordinarily important experiments.