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Configurations of Digital Participatory Budgeting

Participatory budgeting is a democratic innovation increasingly supported by digital platforms. Like any technology, participatory budgeting platforms are not value-free or politically neutral; their design, configuration, and deployment display assumptions and configure participant behaviour. To understand what kinds of configurations occur and what kinds of democratic values they hold, we study 31 digital participatory budgeting cases in Spain, France, and Finland. These cases were all supported by the same technical platform, Decidim, allowing us to focus on the variations in its socio-technical configuration. We examined the data from these cases and identified 25 different technical configurations and 15 socio-technical configurations on the platform. These configurations exhibit individual and collaborative assumptions about expected state-society interactions, as well as citizen-driven and controlled approaches to participatory budgeting. Based on these findings, we highlight a dilemma for the designers of these technologies: to what degree should platforms be open to configuration and customization, and which political values should be enforced by platform design?

Language of the session: English