In the eye of the beholder: explaining the effects participatory budgeting on general public political support

This study explores how a novel case of participatory budgeting in Amsterdam impacted two aspects of political support amongst general public citizens: political trust and perceived responsiveness. Despite the growing trend of governments merging small-scale deliberations with large-scale voting to address concerns about political trust deficits and political dissatisfaction, the impact of such hybrid processes on the general public remain largely unexplored. In order to address this gap, we use the structure of systems theory in first explaining how the mechanisms of citizen input, procedural fairness, and outcome favourability are key in explaining such impacts. Based on 23 semi-structured interviews with residents in the area where a participatory budgeting process was implemented, we then establish how these three predefined and other mechanisms explained the impact of this process on general public’s political trust and perceived responsiveness. Our findings underscore the significance of citizen input and the sensation of being heard. Interestingly, we identified crucial aspects not previously considered in the literature, including procedural effectiveness, visibility, and the relevance of the process and its outcomes. The interviews also highlighted how past political experiences and general views on democracy and politics are often neglected in academic discourse on this subject, even though they were found to limit the potential of the studied PB to positively affect general public political support. Finally, citizens ambiguity in actively weighing arguments about the studied PB envisioned another under explored way by which this process can have an impact on general public political support. A key finding throughout this paper is that general public citizens interpret the same participatory budgeting process differently, leading to varied impacts on their levels of political support.