Cherry-picking participation: explaining the fate of proposals from participatory processes

Do participatory processes have an impact on decision making? Research on new forms of participation has flourished, but one of the key aspects of participatory processes that hasbeen the subject of rare systematic analysis and comparison is the fate of their outputs: their policy proposals. Which specific factors explain whether these proposals are accepted, rejected or transformed? This paper contributes to this gap in our understanding in two ways. First,we identify contextual andproposal related factors that are likely to affect the prospect of proposals being implemented. Second, we test the explanatory power of these factors through multilevel analysis on a diverse set of 571policy proposals. Our findings offer evidence that both contextual and proposal related variables are important.The design of participatory processes affects the degree of implementation, with participatory budgeting being most effective. But most significant are proposal level, economic and political factors for explaining outcomes: a proposal’s cost, the extent to which it challenges existing policy and the degree of support among elected officials all strongly affect the chance of implementation.