Changing Inclusiveness of Local Democracy through Participatory Budgeting in a French Town: A Longitudinal and Grounded Analysis

Participatory budgeting (PB) is often quoted as an ambitious democratic innovation, which has known a revival over the last years in local policy-making. Most of the literature focuses on cases in big cities and/or adopts a comparative approach. Concurrently, it is also often assumed that PB is a more ‘inclusive’ and ‘decision-making-oriented’ form of participation than other devices. However, these studies lack a fine-tuned understanding of the evolution of participation over time and of the local social and political context. In this paper, we therefore suggest adopting a more grounded and qualitative view by studying the long-term implementation of PB in a French town of 20.000 inhabitants (Lanester in Britanny). Initially, the offer of participation was mainly based on local neighborhood councils, reaching only 1% of the population. From 2016, these councils have been replaced by PB, considered a more efficient and inclusive manner of participating. We seek to empirically test these assumptions. What does it actually mean to measure levels of democratic inclusion and efficiency? How does the political and social context, and/or the design of the PB account for that? Our paper examines the production and reception of the offer of public participation in this town since 1995, when the current mayor was elected for promoting local participatory democracy, and since 2015 when the PB was implemented. Our understanding of the first period (1995-2015) relies on our mixed-methods doctoral research: observations, in-depth interviews, questionnaires. The present study is based on newly generated data through three rounds of exit polling (2016-2017-2018), gathering a representative sample of the town’s voters. The representativeness of our interpretations is secured by triangulating with exhaustive voters’ information provided by the organizers and informed by participant observation as advisor for the design of the PB. In this paper, we mainly focus on the second period and conduct a two-level analysis on the inclusiveness of PB in Lanester. First, we look at the composition of participants over time (between 2012 and 2015). Who was already participating? Who has left? Who is new? Second, we analyze how these results vary after three years of implementation. Here, we examine the conditions that may encourage or discourage the engagement of participants over time. Do the physical and online ballots attract the same types of voters? Do people vote on projects based on geographical, generational or other criteria? Do voters vote alone or based on collective and deliberative reasoning? Does PB come with a gentrification of participation? Our main result is that short-term and accessible participation offered by (online) PB is more varied and numerous, but comes with less politicization and sociability, compared to the neighborhood councils. This qualitative-quantitative analysis allows us to provide new and robust insights on PB. We also aim to demonstrate how contextual and grounded analysis of democratic innovations can provide a better understanding. Finally, we contribute to the understanding of the conditions under which PB can become an institutionalized device contributing to the renewal of (local) democracy.