Drivers of Participatory Budgeting: Evidence from Finland

Participatory budgeting (PB) has evolved into a global practice adopted by thousands of municipalities across the world (Ganuza & Baiocchi 2012; Sintomer, Röcke & Herzberg 2016; OECD 2020). This rapid diffusion has generated a substantial interdisciplinary literature spanning political science, public administration, urban studies, and civic tech. Core research streams examine PB’s design and typologies; inclusion and equity; policy and fiscal impacts; deliberation quality; digital and hybrid participation; institutionalization and legal frameworks (Ganuza & Baiocchi 2012; Gilman 2016). Despite this breadth, there remains a relative dearth of quantitative studies that identify causal effects and generalizable adoption drivers. That said, previous research has identified several factors that shape PB adoption and implementation at the municipal level. Political sponsorship by reform-oriented mayors and council members, often from left or center-left parties, is a consistent facilitator of implementation (Wampler 2012; Gilman 2016; Su 2017). Administrative and fiscal capacity, including dedicated engagement staff and open-data practices, tend to enable higher implementation rates (Sintomer, Röcke & Herzberg 2016). Conversely, tight budget rules, low capacity, and leadership turnover can constrain PB or lead to “light” consultative formats (Ganuza & Baiocchi 2012). However, most studies contributing with these insights rely on a selection of cities or municipalities where PB has already been implemented instead of a broader sample including both municipalities where PB has been implemented and municipalities that have not decided to make use of participatory budgeting. Thereby introducing the potential issue of selecting on the dependent variable, which may skew the findings that have been identified. This paper responds to the this research gap by leveraging a new collected PB dataset from Finland consisting of data on participatory budgeting measures from all Finnish municipalities. Like several other European countries (e.g. Portugal, Poland) Finland has seen a rapid increase in the use of participatory budgeting in recent years. Although, munipalities of all sizes in Finland use participatory budgeting today, there are still many municipalities that have not implemented such measures. By examining a wide range of municipalities, where some have implemented participtory budgeting, and others that have not, we aim to clarify when and in which type of municipalities PB are most likely to be implemented, what contribute to the size of the participatory budget and whether distintive differences in the goals of the PBs can be identified between different types of municipalities.