Society and public life

(1) Over the past three decades, many municipalities have experimented with participatory budgeting, a process in which residents propose, and then vote directly on, ways to spend a portion of the public budget. Its advocates present it as a remedy for two problems at once. Projects chosen by residents, they argue, match local needs more closely than projects chosen by officials, and taking part renews the civic confidence of people who have come to regard city hall as remote.

(2) The first claim has held up reasonably well. In Marrenfield, a mid-sized city that allocates one-tenth of its capital budget in this way, the political scientist Oona Castell found that residents' ballots favoured small, dispersed projects, such as pedestrian crossings, repairs to community halls and lighting for playgrounds. Projects of this kind rarely survive the conventional budget process, in which a single large scheme is easier for officials to plan, tender and announce. The city's maintenance departments, initially sceptical, later reported that the resident-chosen projects drew fewer complaints after completion than comparable projects chosen by the council.

(3) The second claim is harder to assess, because the people most likely to take part are those who already feel at ease in public settings. Castell found that in Marrenfield's first four cycles, homeowners were twice as likely as renters to attend a proposal meeting, even though renters made up more than half of the city's adults and homeowners most of the remainder. Because the proposals that emerged from these meetings made up the ballot, the preferences of those who attended shaped the menu from which everyone else chose. The vote itself was more representative than the meetings: turnout among renters, though still lower than among homeowners, was much closer to it, perhaps because casting a ballot took minutes whereas a meeting took an evening.

(4) Some critics conclude that participatory budgeting merely hands another lever to groups already well served by conventional politics. Castell draws a narrower lesson. In the fifth cycle, Marrenfield replaced evening meetings in two of its districts with proposal stalls at bus interchanges and school gates, staffed at times when residents were passing anyway. In those two districts, the share of proposals submitted by renters roughly matched renters' share of the district population; in districts that kept evening meetings, it remained well below that share. For Castell, the imbalance lay less in residents' willingness to take part than in the particular form that taking part had been required to take, and forms, unlike attitudes, can be redesigned at modest cost.