Public policy making on the municipal level increasingly becomes a scene for participatory experiments aiming at deepening the democratic quality of political processes. Participatory budgeting is a widespread institution in Latin America and starts spreading in Europe, too. Thus, instruments of democracy measurement seem not to account for participatory democracy. This paper draws up the hypothesis that instruments of democratic measurement cannot account for participatory public policy making because of a representative bias in their conceptual basis. In a first step, relevant definitions of participation are identified, partly in drawing on the example of Belo Horizonte’s (Brazil) participatory budgeting process. In a second step, the conceptual basis of two democracy-measurement tools is examined in order to see what kind of participation is taken into consideration. By these means the paper comes to the conclusion that the democratizing potential of local participatory public policy making is insufficiently accounted for.
