Plurality in the Portuguese-speaking world

As of October 2026, there is no Portuguese translation of the book *Plurality*. In Brazil, the lawyer Ronaldo Lemos has introduced the book and quadratic voting in a newspaper column, and in 2024 Audrey Tang and Glen Weyl visited the country. As the birthplace of participatory budgeting, Brazil is also spoken of as having ties with Taiwan.

Residents gather and decide for themselves how a city's budget is spent. This approach, called "participatory budgeting", began in 1989 in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. The same kind of system is used in Taiwan, and Audrey Tang has said that Porto Alegre was one of its models. This article traces how the book Plurality and the ideas around it have been received in Portuguese-speaking Brazil and Portugal.

In short

As of October 2026, there is no Portuguese translation of Plurality, the book by Tang and E. Glen Weyl. In January 2025 the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo also wrote that the book had not yet been translated into Portuguese [1][2].

In Brazil, Ronaldo Lemos, a lawyer at the institute ITS Rio, has introduced quadratic voting and Plurality in a column in Folha [3][4][5]. In June 2024, Tang and Weyl visited Brazil [4]. In Portugal, no press coverage of the book or of the two authors has been found.

For example

The visit by Tang and Weyl (June 2024). In a column of June 23, 2024, Lemos wrote that Tang was in Brazil at that moment. Tang was due to visit Rio de Janeiro on the 23rd and the capital Brasília on the 24th, with Weyl also along. The column introduced the two as about to release a new book, "Plurality" (Pluralidade), which can be downloaded free of charge online [4].

Quadratic voting in city councils (2021). Quadratic voting is a way of voting in which each person holds several votes, and putting more of them together on one proposal becomes more and more expensive. According to Lemos, in 2021 ITS teamed up with RadicalxChange to begin studying this kind of voting in Brazil [3]. There were trials using the method in cities such as Gramado and João Pessoa. Gramado's city council tried it for deciding the order in which items would be put to a vote [5]. Lemos also writes of having taken part in creating Concordamos.com.br, the first quadratic voting site in Portuguese [6].

In more detail

Lemos as a messenger

The most visible messenger is Lemos. In the 2024 column, Lemos connected Plurality with participation mechanisms that Brazil had built itself. The column pointed out that participatory budgeting, created in Brazil, is now used from Dubai to New York; that more than 72,000 contributions were sent by post during the drafting of the 1988 constitution; and that the basic internet law, the "Marco Civil da Internet", was drawn up openly online. Lemos's reading is that the book reminds us that Brazil was once ambitious about plurality [4].

Weyl and Brazil

Weyl's ties with Brazil predate Plurality, going back to the time of Radical Markets, which Weyl wrote with the legal scholar Eric Posner. The Brazilian edition, Mercados radicais, was published by Portfolio-Penguin in 2019, translated by Denise Bottmann, at 336 pages [7].

According to an article in the newspaper Estadão at the time of publication, Weyl spent several months in Rio in the summer of 2007. The article writes that seeing things such as the gap between wealthy districts and the favelas helped him give shape to the book's ideas [8]. Lemos's 2024 column writes that Weyl lived in Rio's Vidigal district [4]. → Radical Markets

Tang and Brazil

In 2020 Tang was interviewed by Paula Soprana, a Folha reporter, and talked about "humor over rumor", a way of countering disinformation [9]. When the reporter asked about Brazil's debate over "fake news", Tang answered that because news and journalism are the same word in Mandarin, Taiwan does not use the term "fake news" and says disinformation instead (English transcript, CC0) [10].

In a 2025 interview with Folha, Tang compared interoperability between social media (connecting services run by different companies) to Pix, Brazil's instant payment system. Her explanation was: like email, and like Pix, which you can use without having an account at a particular bank [2]. Pix also appears in chapter 4-3 of the book, as an example of the publicly supported instant payment services created by developing-world governments [11].

Participatory budgeting and Brasil Participativo

Porto Alegre's participatory budgeting began in 1989. According to the city's announcement, 18,055 people came to its assemblies in 2025, the second-highest turnout since it began [12]. In a 2025 podcast, Tang said that Taiwan's participatory budgeting system was learned from Porto Alegre in Brazil, as well as from Madrid and Barcelona [13].

A 2025 Folha article writes the following in the reporter's own voice. Tang names the participatory budgeting devised by Workers' Party (PT) city governments in the 1990s as one of her inspirations. In Brazil, however, the system lost momentum over the years. "Brasil Participativo", the federal government's participation platform introduced by President Lula, puts its emphasis on other subjects [2].

In 2023 Brasil Participativo gathered proposals from citizens for the national multi-year plan (PPA) [14]. However, within the materials this site has collected, no primary source has been found that directly links Brasil Participativo with Plurality or Polis.

Curitiba and Weyl (2025)

In June 2025, the mayor of the Brazilian city of Curitiba received Weyl and Paula Berman of RadicalxChange. According to the city's announcement, the purpose was to discuss using in Curitiba a tool based on "algoritmos de consenso" (consensus algorithms), and the mayor said the city would consider how to use it. The city's announcement describes this tool as developed by Weyl and tested in Taiwan [15]. RadicalxChange, for its part, reports that in the same month it held a training session for Curitiba's civil servants, giving them hands-on experience of Pol.is and quadratic voting [16].

Portugal

The point of contact found in Portugal goes back to 2016. On March 4, 2016, Tang gave a seminar at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra. It was hosted by EMPATIA, a research project building information-technology infrastructure for participatory budgeting, coordinated by Giovanni Allegretti. There, Tang also explained how Taipei City came to start participatory budgeting [17]. A 2017 article on the business news site ECO reported that 118 participatory budgets were under way in Portugal, making it one of the leading countries in Europe [18].

What is debated

Criticism of Mercados radicais. The economist Monica de Bolle told Estadão that the book ignores politics and behavioral economics and attributes a "poder mágico" (magical power) to the rationality of markets. The same article also writes that, as de Bolle suggests, the book may be best read as a work of political philosophy [8]. → Criticisms of Plurality
Do Community Notes work? Folha translated and published (2025) a hands-on report by Geoffrey A. Fowler, a reporter for the US newspaper The Washington Post. Of the 65 notes Fowler wrote on Meta's services over four months, three were published, fewer than 5%. As one possible reason, Fowler writes that Meta may not have gathered participants diverse enough to meet the conditions of the "algoritmo de ponte" (bridging algorithm), which requires agreement among people who disagree [19]. → Community Notes · Bridging
Running a participation platform. According to Folha's column "Painel", in Brasil Participativo's first month, 20 of 2,420 proposals were removed under its terms of use. Eleven of them were proposals calling for paper records of votes [14]. And as of the night of July 14, 2023, proposals seeking better conditions for particular professions, such as community health workers, held the top places in the voting [20].
Who made Curitiba's tool? The city's announcement writes that the tool discussed was «desenvolvida por Weyl» (developed by Weyl) [15]. On the other hand, the tools named in RadicalxChange's report on the training session are Pol.is and quadratic voting [16]. Weyl's name is not among the authors (Christopher Small, Colin Megill and others) of the paper written by the developers of Pol.is [21] (see the article on Polis).

Common misunderstandings

That there is a Portuguese edition. On GitHub there is a copy (fork) calling itself "Tradução para português" (Portuguese translation), but its contents are the original as is, with no translated text [1].

Where it fits in Plurality

In the text of the book (English edition), Brazil appears in four places. In 4-3 and 7-0 it is an example of a publicly supported instant payment service (Pix) [11][24]. In 2-0 it is listed as 49th in the UN e-government development index for 2022, ranked below several authoritarian governments [22]. In 3-3 the book writes that "Kenya, Brazil and especially India have pioneered digital infrastructure for development" [23]. What has linked Brazil's participatory budgeting with the book is Lemos's columns and Tang's own remarks [4][13]. → Digital public infrastructure

The mechanisms that have actually run in Brazil are quadratic voting in Gramado and João Pessoa, and Polis, used in the Curitiba training session [5][16]. RadicalxChange has been involved as one of the actors.

Reading this alongside other language areas brings out the differences.

The Plurality movement in Japan — a case where a volunteer translation was completed and a Japanese edition came out
Plurality in the Spanish-speaking world — another region from which Taiwan learned participatory budgeting
Plurality in Italy · Plurality in the French-speaking world

Sources

GitHub, elvis-sik/plurality-portuguese (record of the fork) — https://github.com/elvis-sik/plurality-portuguese ［CC0］
Folha de S.Paulo, "Livro mostra como Taiwan aposta em internet e participação social para driblar discurso de ódio" (2025-01-03, in Portuguese) — https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/tec/2025/01/livro-mostra-como-taiwan-aposta-em-internet-e-participacao-social-para-driblar-discurso-de-odio.shtml
Ronaldo Lemos, "Tendências de tecnologia para 2021" (Folha, 2021-01, in Portuguese) — https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/ronaldolemos/2021/01/tendencias-de-tecnologia-para-2021.shtml
Ronaldo Lemos, "Audrey Tang, maior nome da democracia digital, está no Brasil" (Folha, 2024-06-23, in Portuguese) — https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/ronaldolemos/2024/06/audrey-tang-maior-nome-da-democracia-digital-esta-no-brasil.shtml
Ronaldo Lemos, "Brasil pode apontar caminhos da democracia" (Folha, 2021-12, in Portuguese) — https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/ronaldolemos/2021/12/brasil-pode-apontar-caminhos-da-democracia.shtml
Ronaldo Lemos, "Mudança no voto do BBB traz uma lição" (Folha, 2024-01, in Portuguese) — https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/ronaldolemos/2024/01/mudanca-no-voto-do-bbb-traz-uma-licao.shtml
Companhia das Letras, Mercados radicais (2019, in Portuguese) — https://www.companhiadasletras.com.br/9788582850831-mercados-radicais-7445/p
Estadão, "Economista propõe sistema 'mais socialista que Marx e mais livre mercado que Friedman'" (2019-04-27, in Portuguese) — https://www.estadao.com.br/cultura/economista-propoe-sistema-mais-socialista-que-marx-e-mais-livre-mercado-que-friedman/
Folha, "Meme é arma de Taiwan contra desinformação sobre coronavírus, diz ministra" (2020-09-12, in Portuguese) — https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mercado/2020/09/meme-e-arma-de-taiwan-contra-desinformacao-sobre-coronavirus-diz-ministra.shtml
Interview with Paula Soprana (2020-07-18) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2020-07-18-Interview-with-Paula-Soprana.md ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-3 "Commerce and Trust" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-3/eng/ ［CC0］
City of Porto Alegre, "Orçamento Participativo de 2025 mobilizou 18 mil pessoas" (2025-08, in Portuguese) — https://prefeitura.poa.br/smgov/noticias/orcamento-participativo-de-2025-mobilizou-18-mil-pessoas
Audrey Tang, "Accelerating AI Ethics: AI and Democracy" (2025-08-05) — https://archive.tw/2025-08-05-accelerating-ai-ethics-ai-and-democracy ［CC0］
Folha, "Painel: Plataforma de sugestões populares para o orçamento barra pedido de voto impresso" (2023-07, in Portuguese) — https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/painel/2023/07/plataforma-de-sugestoes-populares-para-o-orcamento-barra-pedido-de-voto-impresso.shtml
City of Curitiba, "Curitiba estuda plataforma digital para ampliar diálogo com a população" (2025-06-27, in Portuguese) — https://www.curitiba.pr.gov.br/noticias/curitiba-estuda-plataforma-digital-para-ampliar-dialogo-com-a-populacao/78087
RadicalxChange, "Pol.is and Quadratic Voting in Curitiba" (2025-06-30) — https://www.radicalxchange.org/updates/announcements/2025-06-polis-and-quadratic-voting-in-curitiba/
Fork the Government at CES (2016-03-04) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2016-03-04-Fork-the-Government-at-CES.md ［CC0］
ECO, "Portugal tem 118 orçamentos participativos, um dos melhores valores europeus" (2017-04-09, in Portuguese) — https://eco.sapo.pt/2017/04/09/portugal-tem-118-orcamentos-participativos-um-dos-melhores-valores-europeus/
Folha, "Zuckerberg demitiu checadores de fatos, e testamos o substituto deles" (2025-08-04, in Portuguese) — https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/tec/2025/08/zuckerberg-demitiu-checadores-de-fatos-e-testamos-o-substituto-deles.shtml
Folha, "Painel: Pautas corporativistas lideram votação em plataforma participativa do governo federal" (2023-07-15, in Portuguese) — https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/painel/2023/07/pautas-corporativistas-lideram-votacao-em-plataforma-participativa-do-governo-federal.shtml
Christopher Small and others, "Polis: Scaling Deliberation by Mapping High Dimensional Opinion Spaces" (RECERCA, 2021) — https://doi.org/10.6035/recerca.5516 ［CC BY-SA 4.0］
Plurality, 2-0 "Information Technology and Democracy: A Widening Gulf" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-0/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 3-3 "The Lost Dao" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 7-0 "Policy" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/7-0/eng/ ［CC0］

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