Participatory Budgeting in France: Opening Local Budgets or Lip Service?

Many works have been studying how participatory budgeting (PB) has been adapted within a country. PB used to be in Brazil a first step towards radical changes between administration and the citizens’ role with a much bigger discussion about local assets and source of incomes, few works have tried to compare open data initiatives related to local budgets with PB and this study shows they are following distinct patterns. Looking at how these policy transfers in France have been adopted in 2017, this paper analyses 61 active cases of local PB and around 30 cases of open budgets based on web mining and a database for french newspaper. Both are not compulsory by national law, which create an open framework for local authorities to increase accountability for representative democracy. More than 4 millions people are able to have a say about local budget through participatory budgeting. Most of the winning proposals in PB are related to very traditional policies and capital investments such as sport facilities, community gardens and basic infrastructures whereas submitted proposals are covering broader issues. 10 years ago, Sintomer's team was labelling french PB as typical of "proximity democracy". If lack of precise rules and the omnipresence of elected officials were prominent in the first generation of PB in France, now most of processes are more formal and we might wonder if "selective listening" or cherrypicking typical from that time is still occurring as budgets are bigger (Parisians are voting for €100,000,000 each year). Still most of participatory budgeting processes are only discussing less than 1% of local budgets. Most of winning proposals in PB are related to very traditionnal policies and capital investments such as sport facilities, community gardens and basic urban infrastructures whereas submitted proposals are broader than these issues. But city halls are filtering proposals before the vote, in order to choose which proposals are "feasible" or "desirable" from their point of view. This means than informal cherrypicking is still happening and interviews confirm how political filter is maintained. Poor accountability happens in most cases also due to the nature of filtered proposals. Only 9% publish online data about the current implementation status of proposals and 13% are explaining the motives for rejecting proposals prior to the vote (neither online or offline). So french PB cases can't be seen as robust democratic innovations and they can't help to foster accountability and appears unlikely to increase citizenry trust. This participatory institution is not aiming at democratizing bureaucracy.