Abstract
Participatory budgeting (PB) is one of the most popular democratic innovations of recent times. Since its first implementation in Germany in 1998, a growing number of municipalities have experimented with it. Unlike in other countries, PB processes in Germany follow primarily the goal of increasing transparency, efficiency, and service orientation as part of an effort to modernise public administration. Since the constitutions of the 16 German Länder stipulate that decisions on the budgets rest with the elected politicians at the municipal levels, the rather homogeneous PB process designs concentrate on the information and consultation stage, less on the accountability stage. Although overall empirical evidence is rather scarce, it shows that this results in a low participation rate of citizens. This raises the question as to the motivation of municipal politicians to introduce PB processes at all. According to empirical analysis by the authors, municipalities with a PB process are on average in a worse financial situation than those without. Consequently, PB seems to be used as a tool to spread responsibility, gain legitimacy, and raise understanding by citizens for necessary cutting decisions. Changing the PB design so as to give citizens some say on how to spend a fixed amount of money might increase participation rates. In addition, better integration with other forms of direct democracy at the municipal level might also increase the overall impact of PB in Germany.
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Notes
- 1.
For more on the German municipal level, see (Zimmermann & Döring, 2019).
- 2.
For further information, see www.buergerhaushalt.org.
- 3.
Note that there is no official register of PB in Germany. In the following, we use the most recently available data from different sources and only proven cases are named. Therefore, inconsistencies in the compilation of data are inevitable and therefore this data set contains only approximate values for the total number of PB processes in Germany.
- 4.
- 5.
Own calculation based on open data downloaded from ‘List of processes’ on www.buergerhaushalt.org/en/list (last access 02/09/2020).
- 6.
Data for PB adoption come from own research and (Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 2018; Franzke & Kleger, 2010; Herzberg, 2009; Ruesch & Ermert, 2014, p. 3; Ruesch & Wagner, 2014, p. 288; Sintomer et al., 2010). Budgetary data come from the Bertelsmann Foundation. Within the project ‘Wegweiser Kommune’, the (Bertelsmann Foundation, n.d.) gathers and publishes data on all German municipalities with at least 5000 inhabitants.
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Apostolou, J., Eckardt, M. (2022). Participatory Budgeting in Germany: Increasing Transparency in Times of Fiscal Stress. In: De Vries, M.S., Nemec, J., Špaček, D. (eds) International Trends in Participatory Budgeting. Governance and Public Management. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79930-4_2
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