The project addresses several critical questions about the connection between decision-making practices and democracy: How does participatory budgeting, a process in which a government sets aside part of a public budget for the community to allocate, impact patterns of political behavior and civic engagement in the communities where it is implemented? Are investments in new opportunities for public involvement in budgeting worthwhile? This project tests assertions about the democratic impact of small-scale governance reforms like participatory budgeting. It advances a new mid-level institutional theory of participatory budgeting that describes how a new set of rules around budgeting may enable new patterns of communication and mobilization within a political community. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods in a comparative evaluation of four cases of participatory budgeting in cities in the US and UK, this research provides a unique set of empirical tests of causal claims about the democratic effects of giving people the chance to directly control local budget decisions.
Intellectual Merit: This project investigates fundamental claims about the democratic impact of narrowly defined participatory governance institutions like participatory budgeting. It integrates disparate but related literatures explaining civic engagement, political institutions, and democratic quality, empirically testing assertions advanced by value-based theories of democracy. In developing an institutional theory of how participatory budgeting may transform the political behavior and preferences of people in a community, this project makes a substantive contribution to ongoing debates within political science about the relationship between institutions and what is generally referred to as political culture, the general pattern of beliefs and behaviors that establish default orientations toward political practices in a community. As a new empirical contribution, it also provides one of the first comparative evaluations of participatory budgeting to draw systematic cross-country comparisons in developed democracies. The project takes a much-needed step toward a general understanding of what distinguishes participatory budgeting as a common set of institutions and how these institutions operate within a political community.
Broader Impact: This research has several broader impacts. First, it is of direct interest and application to policy makers, government officials, and community leaders. Follow-up to fieldwork has also included distributing specially targeted reports from the research back to participants and local organizers of participatory budgeting processes so they can reflect on and incorporate the observations of their process. Second, this project supports the education of undergraduate students by giving them the chance for extensive research experience. Third, during field research, the Co-PI has been able to provide technical assistance to process organizers to improve their own internal research and evaluation capacity. Finally, this research directly contributes to the economic well-being of the country. More efficient and responsive budgeting processes, as supported by effective and targeted implementation of participatory budgeting will have a direct impact on the economic health of urban areas in the US, by making cities more economically competitive and establishing a better environment for business development.
