Political consequences, levels of participation and continuity in participatory budgeting in Catalan municipalities

Participatory budgeting has proliferated as a democratizing instrument for empowering citizens and strengthening the legitimacy of local institutions (Fung, 2015). In Catalonia and Spain, after the local elections in 2015, there is a new emergence due to the improvement of the economic situation and the arrival to power of new parties and coalitions emphasizing direct participation. However, the growth of participatory budgeting is currently at a crucial juncture to ensure long-term continuity and embedment within the local public administration (Bussu et al, 2022). Many local resources and efforts are devoted to their implementation, but there is no systematic knowledge about which are the conditions affecting citizen engagement and which are the political consequences for the local government, being both crucial dimensions for the continuity (Murray Svidroňová et al., 2023). Leaving aside research questions that have been extensively focused on, such as adoption and diffusion of the processes (e.g. Krenjova & Raudla, 2018; de Azevedo et al., 2022), the aim of our research is to investigate 1) the conditions explaining variation in levels of citizen participation in participatory budgeting, and 2) the political consequences of implementing participatory budgeting practices. Sometimes, the experience of participatory budgeting brings about frustration that affects the levels of citizen participation, or politicians' trust in the benefits of policy continuity due to electoral consequences (Kukučková & Bakoš, 2023). Up to now, in the literature, there are challenges for generalizing findings because many of the studies are only qualitative (Font et al., 2016) and based on single case studies and focused on initiatives implemented once or twice and then discontinued (Bartocci et al., 2022, p. 770). Our study emphasizes a temporal and quantitative approach to understanding the institutionalization and continuity of these processes. For the analysis, we rely on our own produced database covering the participatory budgets implemented in Catalonia since the first experience in 2000, with a total of 351 municipalities, 1142 processes and 105 descriptive variables of the process and political and socioeconomic characteristics of the municipality. A relevant typology of cases within the database are those implemented from 2016 with the Decidim platform due to the traceability and availability of more quality observable data. This platform has contributed significantly to the spread of participatory budgeting in Catalan municipalities (Balcells et al, 2023). On the one hand, we will examine the explanatory variables that affect the level of citizen participation, among others, the municipality size, the availability of a digital platform, the associative density, the historical record of participatory budgeting and the process’ characteristics (such as i-voting mechanisms or face-to-face deliberative sessions). On the other hand, we will test the political consequences of implementing participatory budgeting by examining the relationship between the historical record of participatory budgeting, the level of citizen participation and the changes in the local government (measured by different variables such as changes in the party of the major or coalition government, and electoral turnout and volatility).