Abstract
Participatory budgeting is a democratic innovation increasingly supported by digital platforms. Like any technology, participatory budgeting platforms are not value-free or politically neutral; their design, configuration, and deployment display assumptions and configure participant behaviour. To understand what kinds of configurations occur and what kinds of democratic values they hold, we studied 31 digital participatory budgeting cases in Spain, France, and Finland. These cases were all supported by the same technical platform, Decidim, allowing us to focus on the variations in their configurations. We examined the data from these cases and identified 25 different technical configurations and 15 participatory budgeting configurations. The configurations observed in our cases exhibit individual and community-centred assumptions about expected state-society interactions, as well as open vs managerial approaches to participatory budgeting.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 28 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-27 |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| Journal | ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 5 Feb 2024 |
| MoE publication type | A1 Journal article-refereed |
Keywords
- Additional Key Words and PhrasesParticipatory budgeting
- Decidim
- digital platforms
- participatory budgeting configuration
- technical configurations