Year: 2017
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This dissertation examines outcomes from participatory budgeting.Participatory budgeting (or PB) is one popular example of a growing suite of "democratic innovations" that have seen growing attention as concerns have risen about weaknesses of existing institutions of democratic representation and governance.Hopes run high that reforms like PB can rejuvenate the public's interests and capacities as democratic citizens, strengthening the resiliency and quality of developed democratic community.Systematic evaluation, however, has not kept pace with the rapid growth of PB, particularly with respect to the larger hopes for PB as a local treatment for contemporary ills of democracy.Participatory budgeting mechanisms typically determine small portions of local budgets and, while individual participants widely report positive impacts from their personal experience of PB, both research and practice have yet to demonstrate how one might expect such narrow changes in local governance institutions to e ectively transform wider political practices.Responding to this challenge, this dissertation systematically examines the case for participatory budgeting as a strategy of democratic renewal.It starts with an institutional argument articulating the micro-foundations for PB institutions as a democratic institutional intervention, and expands in scope and method to a systematic qualitative assessment of di erent implementations of PB.Finally, it undertakes a multi-dimensional investigation of the observable residues of PB in the wider community.The scope of this project is thus both ambitious and bounded, aiming for a wide ranging application of local community organizations active in both PB and non-PB communities to establish the levels of activity and collaboration in civil society organizations across the di erent communities, testing for any e ect of PB on the frequency of collaboration among community groups and between community groups and government.Chapter takes an even wider view, considering the impact of PB on aggregate measures of political culture and voting behavior in the community as a whole.I rst implement an analysis of public discussion of politics and public life in local media.I develop a new application of machine learning methods, using the R package ReadMe, for which I use human coders to train statistical models to identify mobilizing and demobilizing political expression.This method allows me to estimate the changing tenor of political discourse in PB and non-PB cases over time.Second, I consider voter turnout in local and national elections in case and control areas before and after the introduction of PB, using dynamic panel data methods to identify any e ect on turnout from the implementation of PB.Taken together, the ensemble of di erent measures in Chapters and provides a unique picture of any impact that PB has had on the constellation of expressions and behaviors that make up the democratic culture of the community.In the nal chapter, I draw together the di erent strands of the project by summarizing the scope and limitations of PB's democratic potential.I conclude with a brief re ection on the recurring tensions between innovation and institutionalization presented by the current, evolving practices of PB.
Author: Carolina Johnson
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2783897871