Testing participatory budgeting voting design: Two cases from the city of Kitchener

Participatory budgeting is an emerging space for designing democratic processes. Findings in political science (e.g. Duverger, 1959; Lijphardt, 2012) and social choice theory (e.g. Arrow, 1951) suggest that voting systems strongly shape the political dynamics of their societies, and that they are underexplored in participatory budgeting. This paper presents the results of two action research cases using different participatory budgeting voting processes in the City of Kitchener in Ontario, Canada. Our findings suggest that participatory budgeting processes produce different results from standard planning approaches, with voter-generated results being more popular than the staff-led designs. Moreover, different vote-calculation methods produced different bundles of goods, affirming that voting system design matters in participatory budgeting processes. These results matter for both the building of public trust in these processes and in the effectiveness of participatory budgeting for managing public finances.