The people, the elite, and the general will: how participatory budgets affect citizens’ populist attitudes

Many citizens feel excluded from political decision-making, which in their eyes is dominated by an unresponsive political elite. Citizens with high populist attitudes yearn for more popular control and for ‘the people’ to be included in the political process. Democratic scholars have posed that innovative processes that include and empower citizens can curb such populist sentiments. However, it has not been extensively theorised how and why these processes would affect populist attitudes. Moreover, thus far there has been no empirical research into how citizens with high populist attitudes experience democratic innovations. This paper fills these gaps by generating a theory that explains changes in participants’ populist attitudes using the Heuristic-Systematic Model of attitude change. It does so by studying participatory budgeting (PB) events which are particularly suited to address populist demands as that they are highly inclusive and focused on giving citizens actual influence on policy-making. For doing so, this paper uses panel survey data and 32 semi-structured interviews from three PB events across the Netherlands. The interview data are analysed thematically in order to gain insight into how citizens who change or retain their populist attitudes experience participation in a PB process, and which experiences in particular can account for such a change in populist attitudes. In doing so, this paper sheds light on processes of attitude change amongst those citizens who are most dissatisfied with the political system, and explores the potential of diverse cognitive and affective cues that could attenuate those grievances.