Report on the Visiting International Fellowship, NGPA Programme, Centre for Civil Society,
and London School of Economics.
Fellow: Enrique Peruzzotti (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Argentina)
Period Comprised by the Fellowship: January – June 2008
My experience as a visiting international fellow at the NGPA programme could not have been more
rewarding. The Centre for Civil Society --and more generally the London School of Economics-provided a very stimulating intellectual environment. By participating in the regular seminar series
of the Non-Governmental Public Action Programme as well as in the various conferences that the
programme organised during the period of my stay I was able to get acquainted with the work of
the extensive network of researchers and practitioners that are linked to the activities of the Centre.
I have also benefited from many individual meetings I had over these past six months with UK and
European colleagues, with students, and with the other international fellows that were at different
stages affiliated with the NGPA program.
My work agenda as a fellow focused on two thematic areas: the first one is a book project on the
links between participation and representation in contemporary Latin American democracies; the
second one is a joint research project that Professor Jean Grugel and I have been carrying out in
the past two years on the impact of the Convention of the Rights of the Child on domestic
advocacy in Argentina. The international fellowship helped me to make significant progress in both
areas.
On the one hand, the fellowship provided an invaluable opportunity to take time off from my
teaching and administrative responsibilities at Di Tella University to get acquainted with the most
recent academic work in the fields of participation and representation theory. In this respect, having
access to a first-rate library such as the one at LSE was a real privilege. As a result, I completed a
first draft version of the two initial chapters of the manuscript where I respectively review the
existing literature on representation and participation to propose an alternative theoretical
framework to understand the linkages that exist between various forms of engagement and
representative institutions. Briefly, I argue that the dominant election-centred approach to
representation overlooks what I consider to be the quintessential feature of representative
democracy: the nature and scope of the field of “mediated politics.” The concept of mediated
politics is meant to highlight the importance of different arenas and forms of engagement that feed
representative institutions between elections. The distinctive feature of representative democracy
is not elections but rather the establishment of an institutional setting that gives citizens the
opportunity to influence representative institutions not only at election day but on a continuous and
regular basis. This idea of representative democracy as mediated politics requires the elaboration
of a more differentiated theory of participation that is not built upon a single form of civic
engagement but that can instead give account of the diversity of actors and forms of collective
action that regularly contribute to the practice of democratic representation in contemporary
societies. The main arguments of the project are presented in the article “Representative
Democracy as Mediated Politics: rethinking the links between representation and participation” that
I have specially written for the working paper series of the Centre for Civil Society. I am planning to
produce another paper for the Centre’s working paper series related to this project. The paper will
discuss the benefits and problems which the proliferation of institutionalised arenas for participation
create for democratic representation. This paper will be presented at the final conference of the
NGPA programme in January 2009.
On the other hand, being in London allowed for Professor Jean Grugel and I to work closely
together on the project on the Convention of the Rights of the Child’s impact on domestic advocacy
in Argentina as well as to expand our research agenda in new directions. Prof. Grugel and myself
met on several occasions in London, presented a joint paper at two events –at LSE and the
University of Bradford -- and were able to have a two-day working session in Sheffield thanks to a
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travel grant from the NGPA. In addition to completing the article “Grounding Global Norms in
Domestic Politics: Advocacy Coalitions and the Rights of the Child in Argentina” which was
submitted to the International Studies Quarterly, we developed an agenda for future research and
activities which materialised in two new funding proposals. First, we submitted a conference
proposal for a meeting on “Transnational Activism and Regional Opportunity Structures in Europe
and Latin America” to the Rockefeller Foundation. Second, we developed a research proposal on
adolescent reproductive rights politics in Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Peru which is being
submitted to the ESRC. Finally, we have submitted a third paper on how global instruments and
local struggles feed each other that will presented at the 2008 Globalisation Studies Network
Conference and at a forthcoming workshop at Garnet Bordeaux.
Another important benefit of the international fellowship is that it allowed me to meet and interact
with a large number of colleagues and UK institutions. I have been invited to lecture at the
following institutions: Centre for Civil Society Thursday Lunchtime Seminars, London School of
Economics and Political Science (February 14); Institute of the Americas, University of London
(March 4); ESRC Non Governmental Public Action Theory Workshop, LSE (May 7-8); NonGovernmental Public Action Seminar on Latin America, University of Bradford (May 16); Latin
American Seminar, Nuffield College, Oxford University (May 19); and to the Institute of
Development Studies at the University of Sussex Brighton (May 30). I have also participated as
discussant in the Second Annual Conference of REPLA (European Network of Latin American
Politics) “The Changing Nature of Democratization in Latin American Rights, Politics and
Development” at Nuffield College, Oxford University (March 27), at the European Political Theory
Consortium Workshop on Political Representation, University of Reading (February 22) and gave
one class session on Latin American politics at the University of Westminster, London (March 11).
The debates as well as the specific comments and suggestions that I received in those meetings
provided an invaluable input to my research project. I have had numerous meetings with master
and Ph.D students from LSE, Oxford University, University of Bradford, University of Sussex,
Universidad de Salamanca, and Sciences Po which provided an opportunity to learn about their
academic interests and research projects. As a result of such meetings I have arranged Di Tella
University to provide institutional support and affiliation to two PhD candidates from LSE and
Oxford respectively who will be conducting field research in Argentina this year.
In addition, I was invited to academic meetings in China, France and Spain. I gave paper
presentations at the following conferences: a) Segunda Tribuna MEPA: Los Retos de la
Democracia Representativa en América Latina, Fundación Internacional para Iberoamérica de
Administración y de Políticas Públicas, Programa de Liderazgo Político y MEPA, Madrid, (February
28); b) International Conference on NGO Accountability, NPO Research Center, School of Public
Administration, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China (April 26-7); c) Quatriene Recontre
Europe –Ameriques: Deliberation et dispositifs de reddition de comptes en Amerique latine,
Poitiers (May 23); and d) Les dispositifs participatifs en Amerique latine. Entre accountability et
pouvoir populaire, SciencesPo, Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Intenationales (May 26).
Finally, in the period I spent at LSE, I also worked on a number of articles and pieces that,
although not directly connected with the two projects mentioned above, address some interesting
questions for the field of non-governmental public action such as the relations of social movements
with the media, their contribution to an agenda of governmental accountability, or the specificities
of the populist understanding of what constitutes democratic representation. I co-authored (with
Silvio Waisbord, George Washington University) the article “The Environmental Story that wasn’t:
Advocacy, Journalism, and the Asambleismo movement in Argentina” which has been accepted for
publication in the journal Media, Culture and Society, and the forthcoming edited volume (with
Carlos De la Torre, FLACSO Ecuador), El Retorno del Pueblo. El Populismo en las Nuevas
Democracias Latinoamericanas, for which I wrote the chapter “Populismo y Representación” and
co-authored the introduction “El retorno del populismo”. I also wrote a short piece for a Brazilian
publication --Diccionario Analítico da Corrupcao-- on “Accountability and the Control of
Corruption”, the article “La rendición de cuentas social en la Democracia: Nociones y Experiencias
en América Latina” for the Spanish journal Sistema, and the article “Accountability Struggles in
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Contemporary Argentina” that will be translated into Russian and published in a special issue of
the journal Laboratorium.
The NGPA Programme provided a warm and lively work atmosphere. Jane Schiemann, Maria
Schlegel, and Christine Whyte were always extremely efficient and courteous. Jane Schiemann, in
particular, was instrumental in me having a stress-free stay in London, dealing diligently with all my
requests and questions. I was very surprised when, upon arrival on my first day at LSE, she
solved all of the basic issues that are usually related to this sort of appointment –such as space
work, library and computer access, payment instalments, etc-- in only a matter of hours. I am very
grateful for the hospitality and support of the program director, Professor Jude Howell. I learned a
lot from her work and from our talks, benefiting from the constant encouragement that I received
from her and the programme over these past six months.
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