IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cityxx/v22y2018i4p551-567.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Participatory budgeting, austerity and institutions of democracy

Author

Listed:
  • Mark Davidson

Abstract

Participatory budgeting operates in approximately 1500 cities across the globe. Often these projects are used in attempts to make city government more democratic. The growing popularity of participatory budgeting also reflects scholarly concerns about elite interests dominating policy-making to the extent that democratic institutions principally serve legitimation purposes. This paper examines the implementation and evolution of participatory budgeting in the City of Vallejo, California, following its 2008 chapter 9 bankruptcy. The City of Vallejo introduced participatory budgeting as part of a broader collection of reforms implemented to restructure the city budget and re-legitimate Vallejo’s city government. Participatory budgeting introduced new decision-making processes to the city and directed expenditures into new programs. An evaluation of the reforms and outcomes of Vallejo’s participatory budgeting reveals a picture of mixed success. Although participatory budgeting opened an important part of the city’s budget to democratic deliberation, the process became aligned with entrenched institutional interests. In conclusion the paper reflects on how the institutional structures of urban politics might limit the democratic potential of participatory budgeting.

Suggested Citation

  • Mark Davidson, 2018. "Participatory budgeting, austerity and institutions of democracy," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(4), pages 551-567, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:22:y:2018:i:4:p:551-567
    DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2018.1507107
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13604813.2018.1507107
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13604813.2018.1507107?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ilan Wiesel & Fanqi Liu, 2021. "Conceptualising modes of redistribution in public urban infrastructure," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 58(8), pages 1561-1580, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:22:y:2018:i:4:p:551-567. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CCIT20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.