Does Participatory Budgeting Bolster Voter Turnout in Elections ? The Case of the Czech Republic

Abstract

Th ough participatory budgeting (PB) is oft en discussed as a tool to bolster the level of civic participation and the quality of democracy, empirical research on the subject off ers ambiguous results. In the Czech Republic, PB was introduced 5 years ago, and the number of implemented PBs has since increased substantially. Th e purpose of this article is to evaluate whether the use of PB is associated with higher voter turnout in municipal and parliamentary elections. Voter turnout in Czech municipalities that implemented PB is analyzed and compared with the control group of municipalities without PB. Considered by type of election, we found that the impact of PB use on voter turnout is higher for local elections than it is for national elections, which is in line with our assumptions. However, our results were signifi cant for Prague districts only. Participatory budgeting could increase voter turnout in local election, but there are other factors that must be considered.

Organizational Readiness for Co-Creation of Public Services in the Central and Eastern European Administrative Tradition: Development of the Conceptual Multi-Attribute Decision Support Model

“…Richardson 2016a, 2016c;Torvinen and Haukipuro 2018), a "one-size-fi ts-all" approach to co-creation is hence less successful in the organizations that are insensitive to the context and the corresponding administrative culture. A literature review reveals that the concept of co-creation is mostly studied in the context of Anglo-Saxon administrative traditions and rarely in the CEE administrative tradition (Jukić et al 2019;) despite the fact that there are several promising co-creation cases in this region (see for example Kempa and Kozłowski 2020;Kukučková and Bakoš 2019). In accordance with the fi ndings that in matters of the public-administration context (Ferlie and Ongaro 2015) especially when considering successive New Public Management reforms.…”

Selected Factors Determining the Adoption and Use of Participatory Budgeting in Central and Eastern Europe

“…Although one can find a few small-scale comparisons whose authors dealt mainly with institutional settings (Džinić, Murray Svidroňová, Markowska-Bzducha, 2016;Fölscher, 2007;Kersting et al 2016;Mączka et al 2021;Radzik-Maruszak, Bátorová, 2015;Lehtonen, 2021), numerous country studies (Brabec, 2019;Džinić, 2018;Garaj, Bardovič, 2020;Gondášová, Svidroňová, 2016;Kempa, Kozłowski, 2020;Kukučková, Bakoš, 2019;Milosavljević et al 2020;Minárik, 2020;Sześciło, 2015) and case studies (Balážová, 2021a;Bardovič, 2021;Bednarska-Olejniczak, Olejniczak, 2016;Boc, 2019;Hrabinová, 2020;Kociuba, Rabczewska, 2019;Krenjova, Reinsalu, 2013;Maerøe et al 2021;Polko, 2015;Švaljek, Rašić Bakarić, Sumpor, 2019;Tomášková, Buzková, 2020;Zapletalová, Soukop, Šaradín, 2020) have prevailed. It is also possible to find studies whose authors evaluated the legal conditions of individual CEE countries from the perspective of the adoption or continued use of PB (Birskyte, 2013;Šramel, 2018;Zawadzka-Pąk, Tomášková, 2019).…”

The Impact of the D21 Method and Its Modification on Citizens’ Participation in Participatory Budgeting. The Case of the Czech Republic

“…Wampler in Shah (2007) differentiates between two types of participatory budgeting programs: project -focused PB (public works programs) and PB focused on thematic programs (general spending policies). Project-oriented PBs could often be found in EU countries, mainly in CEE countries (Džinić et al, 2016;Olejniczak, Bednarska-Olejniczak, 2018;Kukučková, Bakoš, 2019) and these PBs prevail also in Canada and in the U.S. (Calabrese et al, 2020;Carrol et al, 2016;Lerner, Secondo, 2012;Pape, Lerner, 2016).…”

“…The number of participants in participatory budgeting does not often fulfil the expectations of politics and public administration (Zepic et al, 2017). Only few PB participants can lead to PB being perceived as a process with low legitimacy because citizen interests lack their representativeness when only a few citizens participate (Kukučková, Bakoš, 2019;Zepic et al, 2017;Wampler, 2012;Bhatnagar et al, 2003). A low participation rate was often described as a problem in the CEE countries (see, e.g., Džinić et al, 2016;Fölscher, 2007).…”