Participatory budgeting: a significant contribution to participatory democracy

Cabannes, Y

doi:10.1177/095624780401600104

Cited by 301 publications

(135 citation statements)

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“…Participatory Budgeting The experimental setting for this work, and a driving motivation, is Participatory Budgeting, in which voters are asked to help create a government budget. Participatory budgeting has been among the most successful programs of Crowdsourced Democracy, with deployments throughout the world allocating hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and studies have shown its civic engagement benefits [5,14,15,21,22,30,32].…”

Section: Stochastic Gradient Descentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Methods and experiments to increase large-scale, direct citizen participation in policy-making have recently become commonplace as an attempt to revitalize democracy. Computational and crowdsourcing techniques involving human-algorithm interaction have been a key driver of this trend [5,21,22,28]. Some of the most important collective decisions, whether in government or in business, lie in high-dimensional, continuous spaces -e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Iterative Local Voting for Collective Decision-making in Continuous Spaces

Garg¹,

Kamble²,

Goel³

et al. 2019

jair

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Many societal decision problems lie in high-dimensional continuous spaces not amenable to the voting techniques common for their discrete or single-dimensional counterparts. These problems are typically discretized before running an election or decided upon through negotiation by representatives. We propose a algorithm called Iterative Local Voting for collective decision-making in this setting. In this algorithm, voters are sequentially sampled and asked to modify a candidate solution within some local neighborhood of its current value, as defined by a ball in some chosen norm, with the size of the ball shrinking at a specified rate.We first prove the convergence of this algorithm under appropriate choices of neighborhoods to Pareto optimal solutions with desirable fairness properties in certain natural settings: when the voters' utilities can be expressed in terms of some form of distance from their ideal solution, and when these utilities are additively decomposable across dimensions. In many of these cases, we obtain convergence to the societal welfare maximizing solution.We then describe an experiment in which we test our algorithm for the decision of the U.S. Federal Budget on Mechanical Turk with over 2,000 workers, employing neighborhoods defined by L 1 , L 2 and L ∞ balls. We make several observations that inform future implementations of such a procedure.

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Section: Stochastic Gradient Descentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Iterative Local Voting for Collective Decision-making in Continuous Spaces

Garg¹,

Kamble²,

Goel³

et al. 2019

jair

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show abstract

“…Other institutions around the globe exist at the local level in many countries and involve citizen participation and input. For example, "Health Councils" and "Participatory Budgeting" programs in Brazil and "Communal Councils" in Venezuela allow citizens to discuss and decide local policy decisions (Avritzer 2009;Cabannes 2004;Gott 2008;Wampler 2007). Similarly, "Town Hall" meetings in many areas of New England in the United States embrace processes that are similar to ancient Athenian democracy by allowing citizens to discuss, propose, and express policy preferences.…”

Section: A Return To Something That Once Was?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Process, Theory, and Practice in Direct Democracy: Avenues for New Research

Cortés

2019

Politics & Policy

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Direct democracy (DD)—including initiatives and referendums—is increasingly used to decide policy around the world. Based on a wide‐ranging review of literature published over the past 25 years, this article offers theoretical and methodological recommendations to advance the study of DD. First, more focus should be placed on the stages of DD and how they affect one another. Richer theories can only flow once the origins, rules, and context of DD are considered—including the endogeneity of DD. Second, a stronger analysis of how DD is justified by democratic theory is needed; I demonstrate that some mechanisms of DD are clearly supported by democratic theory while others lack a coherent foundation. Finally, historical (e.g., ancient Athens) and contemporary DD are often used interchangeably. An overview of past institutions reveals that contemporary DD is not a return to something that once was. Each lesson provides fruitful avenues for future research. Related Articles Adams, Brian E. 2012. “Citizens, Interest Groups, and Local Ballot Initiatives.” Politics & Policy 40 (1): 43‐68. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2011.00336.x Stephan, Mark. 2004. “Citizens as Representatives: Bridging the Democratic Theory Divides.” Politics & Policy 32 (1): 118‐135. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2004.tb00178.x Waheduzzaman, Wahed, and Sharif As‐Saber. 2015. “Politics and Policy in Achieving Participatory Governance in a Developing Country Context.” Politics & Policy 43 (4): 474‐501. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12121 Related Media The Centre for Research on Direct Democracy (C2D). N.d. C2D is a database with information on direct democracy institutions around the globe. http://c2d.ch LATINNO is the first comprehensive and systematic source of data on new institutions for citizen participation evolving in Latin America. https://www.latinno.net/en/project-information/ The Initiative and Referendum Institute (IRI). N.d. IRI at the University of Southern California tracks all direct democracy mechanisms in the United States. http://www.iandrinstitute.org

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“…We will revisit the themes discussed above (understanding/knowledge building; expertise and democracy; and audiences and participants), and for each of these, we will show how the practices of PB contain both possibilities and limitations. While PB is in some ways as wonderful as proponents say [Cabannes, 2004;Souza, 2001], it does have some clear limits evident when we look through an economic lens. While PB could be and should be considered as a site for engagement with economics, discussions so far have largely focused around political questions of democracy.…”

Section: What Can Participatorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Building the economic-public relationship: learning from science communication and science studies.

Medvecky¹,

Macknight²

2017

JCOM

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There is a gap between the discipline of economics and the public it is supposedly about and for. This gap is reminiscent of the divide that led to movements for the public understanding of and public engagement with the natural sciences. It is a gap in knowledge, trust, and opinions, but most of all it is a gap in engagement. In this paper we ask: What do we need to think about ― and what do we need to do ― in order to bring economics and its public into closer dialogue? At stake is engaged, critical democracy. We turn to the fields of public understanding of science and science studies for our approach, finding three themes of particular relevance: understanding, expertise, and audience. We then discuss participatory budgeting (PB) as an example of fertile ground for engagement. We argue that with an economic-engagement focus, activities such as PB could be extended into the public-economics gap and provide avenues for an economic equivalent of participatory science: a form of participatory economics.

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Participatory budgeting: a significant contribution to participatory democracy

Cited by 301 publications

References 0 publications

Iterative Local Voting for Collective Decision-making in Continuous Spaces

Iterative Local Voting for Collective Decision-making in Continuous Spaces

Process, Theory, and Practice in Direct Democracy: Avenues for New Research

Building the economic-public relationship: learning from science communication and science studies.

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