Week 10: Participatory budgeting and the ladder of participation

In plain words

Week 10 of the My Vote Forward seminar studies participatory budgeting, in which residents decide how to spend part of a public budget, and the broader question of how much power participation actually gives people. Students read Sherry Arnstein’s 1969 “ladder of citizen participation,” Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright’s work on participatory governance, Gianpaolo Baiocchi’s study of Porto Alegre, Brazil, and two studies measuring participatory budgeting’s effects on spending and infant mortality.

Some participation is real power. Some is for show. Arnstein’s ladder sorts them. Participatory budgeting is one of the best-studied forms that hands residents real decisions, and research in Brazil links it to more spending on health and sanitation. This week asks what made that work, and what a priorities channel that decides nothing can learn from it.

Defined terms

• Participatory budgeting: a process in which residents deliberate and decide how to allocate part of a public budget. See participatory budgeting.
• Ladder of citizen participation: Arnstein’s typology arranging forms of participation by how much power citizens hold over a plan or program.
• Empowered participatory governance: Fung and Wright’s term for institutions that give ordinary people direct, deliberative roles in public decisions with real consequences.
• Tokenism: participation that lets people speak without giving them power over the result.
• Resource allocation: dividing limited funds among competing uses. See resource allocation.

Learning objectives

By the end of week 10, a participant should be able to:

1. Describe Arnstein’s ladder and place real participation processes on it.
2. Explain Fung and Wright’s model and name the cases in Deepening Democracy.
3. Summarize Baiocchi’s findings on Porto Alegre, including his reply to the domination objection.
4. State what Gonçalves and Touchton and Wampler found, and what their designs can and cannot show about causation.
5. Explain how participatory budgeting differs from a priorities channel, and what follows for the authority of each.

Core readings

1. Sherry R. Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35(4), 1969, pp. 216 to 224.⁠¹
2. Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, editors, Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (Verso, 2003), chapter 1.⁠²
3. Gianpaolo Baiocchi, “Participation, Activism, and Politics: The Porto Alegre Experiment and Deliberative Democratic Theory,” Politics and Society 29(1), 2001, pp. 43 to 72.⁠³
4. Sónia Gonçalves, “The Effects of Participatory Budgeting on Municipal Expenditures and Infant Mortality in Brazil,” World Development 53, pp. 94 to 110 (published online 2013).⁠⁴
5. Michael Touchton and Brian Wampler, “Improving Social Well-Being Through New Democratic Institutions,” Comparative Political Studies 47(10), pp. 1442 to 1469 (published online 2013).⁠⁵

Lecture notes

From voice to power

Participatory budgeting is the subject of week 10 because it is one of the clearest cases of participation that decides something. Every channel studied so far, from public comments to polls to priority rankings, informs a decision someone else makes. Participatory budgeting, in its stronger forms, lets residents make the decision. That difference changes who participates, how seriously they participate, and what the results mean. The site’s chapter on participation between elections gives the history; its cases on Porto Alegre, New York City, Paris, Madrid, and Reykjavik show its range, including programs that shrank or ended.

Arnstein’s ladder

Sherry Arnstein wrote in 1969 amid what she called a “heated controversy over ‘citizen participation,’ ‘citizen control,’ and ‘maximum feasible involvement of the poor,’” waged “largely in terms of exacerbated rhetoric and misleading euphemisms.” To encourage “a more enlightened dialogue,” she offered “a typology of citizen participation,” drawing examples from “three federal social programs: urban renewal, anti-poverty, and Model Cities.” The typology, “designed to be provocative, is arranged in a ladder pattern with each rung corresponding to the extent of citizens’ power in determining the plan and/or program”.⁠¹

In the article, the ladder runs from forms Arnstein treats as nonparticipation at the bottom, through degrees of tokenism such as informing and consultation in the middle, to degrees of citizen power such as partnership, delegated power, and citizen control at the top. (This summary of the rungs is the seminar’s; students should read Arnstein’s own descriptions.) The ladder’s lasting value is the question it forces: not “did people participate?” but “how much did their participation determine the outcome?”

Placed on Arnstein’s ladder, most between-election channels sit in the middle. A public comment period is consultation. An advisory survey is consultation. A priority ranking, including the one My Vote Forward describes, is consultation unless an institution binds itself to act on it. Participatory budgeting, where residents’ votes determine which projects are funded, reaches higher. That placement is not a moral ranking of designs. Consultation has legitimate uses, and higher rungs bring their own risks. But it is an honest description of power.

Fung and Wright: empowered participatory governance

Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright’s Deepening Democracy, part of the Real Utopias Project, collects studies of institutions that give ordinary people real roles in public decisions. Its case studies include “Participation, Activism, and Politics: The Porto Alegre Experiment” by Gianpaolo Baiocchi, “Democracy and Development: Decentralized Planning in Kerala” by T. M. Thomas Isaac and Patrick Heller, “Deliberative Democracy, Chicago Style: Grass-roots Governance in Policing and Public Education” by Archon Fung, and “Habitat Conservation Planning” by Craig W. Thomas, followed by commentaries including Jane Mansbridge’s and a closing chapter on “Countervailing Power in Empowered Participatory Governance”.⁠²

The book’s title term names the combination this week examines: participation that is empowered (it decides something), deliberative (people reason together), and governance (it is part of how public institutions actually operate, not a one-off event). The final chapter’s theme, countervailing power, connects to week 3: participatory institutions work best when ordinary participants have organized strength that can offset the advantages of better-resourced actors.

Baiocchi: Porto Alegre and the domination objection

Gianpaolo Baiocchi’s study of Porto Alegre describes civic governance that developed “in the ten years of the municipal administration of the Workers’ Party (P.T.) into a complex system of participatory fora where citizens decide and deliberate upon a variety of municipal policies.” The cornerstone is “the much-publicized Participatory Budget (Orcamento Participativo, O.P.), a neighborhood-based set of deliberative fora on the city’s budget priorities.” Drawing on interviews, historical research, and a survey of 1,039 participants, Baiocchi argues that the evidence offers “a robust defense of the potential of deliberative democracy in face of criticisms deliberation will foster domination of more powerful citizens.” He finds evidence of “the didactic function of participatory governance,” and argues that “participatory governance has directly fostered the creation of new autonomous institutions of civil society”.⁠³

The domination objection is the worry from weeks 3 and 8: that participation will be captured by those with more resources and confidence. Baiocchi’s evidence from Porto Alegre suggests that a well-designed, durable program can partly overcome it by teaching participation and building new organizations. Students should note the conditions: a decade of sustained political commitment, a neighborhood structure, and real money at stake.

Gonçalves: spending and infant mortality

Sónia Gonçalves asked whether participatory budgeting changed outcomes across Brazil. Her abstract, as reproduced by the organization People Powered, states that the paper “investigates whether the use of participatory budgeting in Brazilian municipalities during 1990 to 2004 affected the pattern of municipal expenditures and had any impact on living conditions.” It “shows that municipalities using participatory budgeting favored an allocation of public expenditures that closely matched popular preferences and channeled a larger fraction of their budgets to investments in sanitation and health services,” and that “this change is accompanied by a reduction in infant mortality rates.” The author suggests that “promoting a more direct interaction between service users and elected officials in budgetary policy can affect both how local resources are spent and living standard outcomes”.⁠⁴

Touchton and Wampler: duration and political support

Michael Touchton and Brian Wampler extend the analysis with “an original database of Brazil’s largest cities over the last 20 years.” They report that participatory budgeting programs “are strongly associated with increases in health care spending, increases in civil society organizations, and decreases in infant mortality rates.” Two conditions strengthen the association: it “strengthens dramatically as PB programs remain in place over longer time frames,” and it strengthens “in the hand of mayors from the nationally powerful, ideologically and electorally motivated Workers’ Party”.⁠⁵

Reading the causal evidence fairly

Both studies are observational: municipalities chose whether to adopt participatory budgeting. That makes causal claims harder, because the cities that adopted it may have differed from others in ways that also affected spending and health. Students should read each study’s methods section to see how, and how well, it addresses this. Gonçalves’s own wording, that the spending change is “accompanied by” lower infant mortality, and Touchton and Wampler’s language of association, are appropriately careful. The findings support the view that participatory budgeting can matter; they do not show that any participatory budgeting program, anywhere, will produce the same results.

The conditions matter for interpretation across the political spectrum. The association with Workers’ Party mayors could be read as showing that participatory budgeting works best with committed political support, or that some of the effect reflects the party’s broader program. A reader sympathetic to participatory budgeting and a skeptic should both be able to accept that the evidence leaves this open.

What a priorities channel can learn

Participatory budgeting and a priorities channel differ in a basic way: one decides, the other informs. Arnstein’s ladder makes the consequence plain. People invest more effort when their participation determines outcomes, and institutions that bind themselves to participants’ choices earn a kind of trust that advisory channels do not. A priorities channel that decides nothing will struggle with the problem raised in can an institution ignore a result?: it can be ignored lawfully. On the other hand, a priorities channel is cheaper, can reach more subjects than a capital budget covers, and avoids handing binding power to a self-selected group. The site’s chapters on public budget blindness and tradeoffs discuss how priorities could be connected to the reality that budgets are limited.

A worked example: consultation versus decision

Hypothetical example: two towns of similar size each set aside the same small share of their capital budget for resident priorities. Town A runs an advisory survey and promises to “take results into account.” Town B runs a participatory budget: residents propose projects, volunteer delegates develop them with staff, and residents vote on a binding list. In Town A, participation is broad but shallow, and when the council funds a project that ranked fourth, residents see no reason to take part next year. In Town B, participation is smaller and more demanding, but participants see their chosen projects built, and some of them return as delegates the next cycle, the “didactic function” Baiocchi describes in Porto Alegre.

Neither town’s design is free of problems. Town B’s binding vote hands real decisions to those with time to attend meetings, the resource problem from week 3, unless it invests in outreach. Town A’s survey is cheaper and wider but sits on the consultation rung of Arnstein’s ladder. The example shows why the question “how much power does participation carry?” cannot be separated from “who participates?” and why the Brazilian studies’ emphasis on durability and political support matters: a design only produces learning and trust if it lasts.

Digital platforms and the same questions

Several cities have moved parts of participation online, and the site’s cases on Madrid’s Decide platform, Better Reykjavik, and vTaiwan document how. Moving online changes who can take part and how cheaply, but it does not change the questions this week raises: how much power the participation carries, who participates, and whether the institution commits to act. Students should read those cases with Arnstein’s ladder in hand.

Discussion questions

1. Place three participation processes you know on Arnstein’s ladder. What would it take to move each up one rung? Would that be desirable?
2. Baiocchi argues Porto Alegre’s design countered domination by the more powerful. What features of the design did that work, and could they be copied elsewhere?
3. Touchton and Wampler find stronger effects over longer periods. Why might participatory budgeting take years to show results?
4. If participatory budgeting’s effects are strongest under supportive mayors, is it a democratic institution or a policy tool of one political program? Argue both sides.
5. Should a priorities channel ever bind an institution? Under what conditions?
6. What is lost when participation is limited to a small share of the budget, such as capital projects?

Assignment

Participation design comparison (1,500 words). Compare one participatory budgeting program from the site’s cases with one consultation process from your own jurisdiction. Using official documents, place each on Arnstein’s ladder, describe who participated and how, identify the share of the budget or decision at stake, and assess what is known about outcomes. Then propose how the consultation process could move one rung higher, and state the strongest objection to doing so.

Evidence

Arnstein, Baiocchi, and Touchton and Wampler are quoted from their published abstracts. Gonçalves is quoted from her abstract as reproduced on the People Powered resource page. The Deepening Democracy chapter list is from the volume’s table of contents, as posted at the University of Wisconsin. The seminar’s summary of Arnstein’s rungs goes beyond the abstract and is labeled. All sources were opened on the review date.

Competing interpretations

Supporters of participatory budgeting point to Porto Alegre and the Brazilian quantitative studies as evidence that it improves spending and lives. Skeptics note that the evidence is observational, that effects depend on political support and duration, and that programs elsewhere often cover small budget shares and attract unrepresentative participants. Some critics argue that participatory budgeting can let officials shift responsibility for hard choices onto residents. Others argue that consultation, though lower on Arnstein’s ladder, is more appropriate for complex decisions. The site’s case studies document both successes and programs that declined.

Application to this framework

My Vote Forward’s priorities proposal sits on the consultation rung of Arnstein’s ladder: it informs and does not decide. This week’s readings suggest the framework should say so plainly, should not imply that participation determines outcomes, and should connect priorities to budget limits as its tradeoffs chapter attempts.

Unresolved questions

• Would participatory budgeting produce similar effects in places with different political support, budget structures, and civil society?
• Can an advisory priorities channel earn trust without binding power, or does Arnstein’s ladder imply it cannot?
• How should participatory budgeting’s typically small budget share be weighed against its depth of participation?