Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a process that invites community stakeholders to participate in local level budget decision-making. Scholars have hypothesized that PB is likely to achieve the goals of deliberative democracy because of PB’s intended goals of improving transparency, legitimacy, and social justice through redistribution in the budgeting processes. Redistributive outcomes would likely follow if the PB process is designed in a way that explicitly aims to distribute more resources to poor neighborhoods. Prior research has found that PB in Porto Alegre—an influential case of PB that is cited in the literature—has been evaluated as achieving its goal of allocating more resources toward the poor. Without the explicit equity and social justice principles, however, would poor neighborhoods still achieve more resources through PB?

This paper explores the inclusiveness of the PB process, neighborhoods’ financial needs and its relationship with participatory budgeting outcomes. In this study, for a PB process to be considered “inclusive” it means that more organizational structures (e.g. committee) have been created to encourage citizen participation in the budgeting process. Specifically, this study assesses the first four years of PB in Seoul, South Korea, where there are no explicit criteria for equity and social justice, to determine whether poor districts in the Korean capital have won more projects and/or more funds than relatively wealthier districts. This paper argues that even without the presence of equity criteria, the nature of PB itself may lead to equity and fairness. As PB allocates decision-making authority to ordinary citizens/residents, it is more likely that the budget allocation outcomes resulting from the PB process would reflect the demands of the people. In addition, by allowing more inclusive deliberation, the PB process leads to redistributive effects.  

With respect to methodology, this study analyzes 2,219 projects submitted to the city-level PB process by 25 district in Seoul, Korea during 2012-2015 and employs multi-level analysis to account for both project-level and district-level determinants on the number of projects and the amount of funds per capita that each district has won. Our findings suggest that PB, when designed with organizational structures to encourage citizen participation, is a governance tool that a city can employ to distribute more resources to poor neighborhoods even without the presence of explicit criteria for promoting equity and social justice.