Why Citizen Participation Succeeds or Fails: A Comparative Analysis of Participatory Budgeting

✍ Scribed by Matt Ryan

• Publisher: Bristol University Press
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 244
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Matt Ryan’s landmark comparative review of participatory budgeting, or collective decisions on how public money is spent, reveals the factors behind its success in achieving democratic engagement. The culmination of ten years of research into participation, this is a systematic analysis of how, when and why citizens gain control over these important decisions. Comparing global examples of both positive change and notable failure, the book provides persuasive evidence and guidance for future public involvement in taxation and spending. For advocates and participants of democratic reform and those with interests across political science, this is an essential guide to one of the most significant democratic innovations of our times.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Cover
Epigraph
Why Citizen Participation Succeeds or Fails: A Comparative Analysis of Participatory Budgeting
Copyright information
Table of contents
List of Figures and Tables
List of abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Preface
Part I
1 Understanding Participation as a Response to Democratic Deficits
Democracy and participation
Malaise and innovation
Reform: when theories of democratic legitimacy meet the history of governing societies
Participatory budgeting
Why compare?
Beyond techniques for policymaking and social science: wider significance
Understanding democratic deepening
2 Participatory Budgeting: How Do We Understand Exceptional Democracy?
The scholarship of participatory budgeting
Starting from a single case: Porto Alegre, Brazil
What made Porto Alegre exceptional?
How comparison follows from a single case
3 From Exceptions to Cases of a Participatory Budgeting Phenomenon
How variance in design as well as context explains outcomes – comparison within Brazil
More cases, larger-N comparisons
What prospects for a middle way?
Participatory budgeting and participatory budgeting research move outside Brazil
Comparing participatory budgeting across cultures
Towards a systematic cumulated comparison of participatory budgeting
Part II
4 Comparing Participation Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis
Why now for a cumulative qualitative comparison?
What is qualitative comparative analysis?
Necessity and sufficiency
Combinatorial and asymmetric causation and explanation
Intersection, union and negation
Logical cases, remainders and truth tables
Fuzzy sets, membership scores and calibration
Consistency or inclusion, coverage, relevance and proportional reduction in inconsistency scores
Applying qualitative comparative analysis to participatory budgeting
Iterating between cases and theory to accumulate participatory budgeting knowledge
The challenge of expanding the evidence base
Differentiating PB from participatory grant-making processes: what PB is not
Cases and data for a worldwide comparison
5 What Participatory Democrats Expect
‘Success’
Influencing conditions
The set of government leaders committed to a participatory governing philosophy (pl)
Bureaucratic support for participatory budgeting (bsp)
Autonomous civil society demands for participatory budgeting projects (csd)
Financial basis to spend (fbs)
Why favour these conditions over others?
A note on comparison and time
Conceptualization and calibration: fuzzy logic meets participatory democracy
A fuzzy set analysis of 30 cases
To the analytic moments (with a return ticket)
Part III
6 Necessary Conditions for Democratic Reform
Tests for necessity
Extending the analysis: bringing complexity back in
An improved set calibration for a more deductive analysis?
Necessity
Cumulating research: necessity in participatory budgeting across several cases
7 Success: How Citizen Control of Politics Is Achieved
Elimination using Boolean algorithmic analysis: a little helpful basics
The truth table
Investigating sufficient conditions
Expanded reproduction of Wampler’s Brazil analysis
Larger-N comparison of cases
What has happened to civil society?
Summary: successful conditions for citizen participation
8 How Citizen Control of Politics Is Negated, and the Puzzles That Remain
Wider analysis of five conditions
Negating participatory budgeting over a larger number of cases
Why participation fails and where explanations fail (so far)
Evolving analysis for the longer-term
9 Conclusion: Democratic Innovations after the Beginning
Looking back before looking forward
Expanding comparisons of democratic innovations
Methods and methodologies in research on participatory democratic innovations
The future for participatory budgeting and participatory democracy
References
Index
Back Cover