Participatory Budgeting in Spain and the role of ideology: survivors and victims of the 2019 municipal elections

Transferability and institutionalization are considered two of the most crucial principles to pursue when designing democratic innovations (Smith, 2009; Gilman, 2016). Participatory budgeting (PB) has shown a high capacity to travel around the world (transferability and diffusion) (Sintomer, et al., 2013). Instead, the PBs survivability (institutionalization) seems to be much weaker (Alves & Allegretti, 2012; Spada, 2014). In this paper we analyse one of the most frequently causes of the instability of PBs mentioned in the literature: ruling party change. To do so, we focus on two research questions: What is the probability of continuity of a PB after the change of local government? Second, does the ideological direction of the government change affect the probability of continuity of a PB? To answer these questions, we rely on an original dataset (in process) composed of 628 Spanish municipalities. In this paper we focus on continuity (136n) and discontinuity cases (95n) of PB (total 231n) in order to find out how ruling party change -after 2019 Spanish municipal elections- has affected their continuity during the current legislature. According to our preliminary results ruling party change or continuity is not an explanatory factor itself but rather its ideological direction.