Latest Research: Impacts of participatory budgeting

A growing network of researchers and practitioners around the world have been studying the impacts of PB for decades now. We summarized dozens of studies with clear evidence-based recommendations so you don't have to start from scratch when advocating, organizing, or designing your own PB. For instance, did you know:

• When people engage in public decision-making through participatory budgeting (PB), they may adopt new values and attitudes, such as greater tolerance and a disposition to solve conflicts?;

• PB can both mobilize and increase the number of civil society organizations and even lead to more collaborations across organizations?; and

• Municipalities using PB may generate more local tax revenue because residents believe that the government is working on their behalf and can be held accountable — even if they don’t participate directly in the participatory process?

These findings are all supported by research on the impacts of PB conducted around the world. You can learn more about them, along with 16 other key findings, in our new research data resources.

A growing body of scholarship studies the impacts of participatory and deliberative programs. For practitioners in government and civil society, it can be difficult to sift through this research, which may be inaccessible because it’s written for an academic audience or locked behind a paywall. To address this challenge, we’ve developed these resources to make it easier for you to understand the ways that PB creates change based on experiences across five continents documented in more than 70 scholarly articles and 34 case studies.

Navigating our new Airtable Database

The data are organized into 19 key findings illustrating PB’s impacts on people, communities, and governments, with each finding synthesizing the conclusions of more than one paper. In this way, you can grasp the common threads across geographic and political contexts and, at the same time, understand how the nuances of specific process design choices and contextual factors can contribute to different outcomes.

The data are available both in an interactive Airtable and in a research brief, so you can access them in the way that suits you best. Using the Airtable, you can sort the findings by impact area, region or case study and apply filters to find the information you need.

Example 1: if you’re based in Peru and want to know what impacts have been observed in your region, you can filter the Airtable to zoom in on research from Latin America.

Example 2: If you’re building an advocacy campaign around PB’s impacts on individuals, you can focus on the “People” impact area.

These new resources build on a series of research briefs, seminars, and short articles that we produced in 2021. Together with our global community of researchers, we examined newly published scholarship to provide an up-to-date picture of what we know about the impacts of PB.

What’s next for Participatory Democracy research?

We're working to expand our offering beyond PB to support practitioners advocating for, designing, or implementing other participatory and deliberative methods, like legislative theater and participatory policymaking. This year, we’ll compile and synthesize research on the impacts of citizens’ assemblies and juries. If you’re interested in collaborating on this work, please get in touch.

We hope these resources will be useful to you, whether you want to persuade a government decision-maker to pursue participatory democracy in your community, learn from other experiences about how different process design choices led to particular outcomes, or get inspired about the transformative potential of participatory and deliberative programs.