Exploring Citizen Preferences for Participatory Budgeting using conjoint analysis

The growing disillusionment with politics, evident in the declining trust in democratic institutions, reduced electoral participation, and a sense that political systems are unresponsive to the public's needs, is a pervasive issue in established democracies. However, the phenomenon is hardly new, appearing in the political science literature under terms like "democratic malaise" or "crisis of representation". To address this issue, democratic theorists have advocated for the development of participatory mechanisms. Increasingly referred to as democratic innovations, these methods range from referendums and initiatives as a form of direct democracy, to citizen juries and mini-publics, which embody deliberative democracy ideals and aim to engage citizens more actively and directly in governance. However, to date, we have limited knowledge of the forms that citizens prefer these democratic innovations to take. The focus of this paper is to investigate citizens’ preferences concerning specific aspects of Participatory Budgeting (PB) using a conjoint experimental design. Participatory Budgeting is a participatory tool whereby citizens get to decide how, a typically small, part of a public budget is to be spent, usually at the local level, e.g. of a municipal authority. The data used in this paper draws on a large representative survey spanning 10 European countries, with roughly three thousand respondents from each case in order to reveal citizen preferences in the organization of participatory budgeting, examining aspects like participation mode (online vs. offline), "agenda-setting" (citizen proposals limited to local authority endorsed policy areas vs open), and the nature of decision-making authority (binding vs. consultative). Results from the data pooled from different countries suggest a straightforward preference for more open and citizen-controlled PB process, although country-level differences are present. Moreover, heterogeneous effects emerge from subgroup analyses of groups of different education, political ideology etc.