Voices in the Budget: Age and Digital Engagement in Budapest’s Participatory Budgeting

Participatory budgeting offers a novel way of governing local public matters. Grounded in democratic decision-making, it enables residents to directly decide how a portion of public funds should be spent on community priorities. First introduced in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989, the model sought to increase transparency and ensure that budget choices better mirrored local needs, while also fostering citizens’ sense of responsibility in public decision-making. Since its original launch, participatory budgeting has been used widely, particularly across Latin America and Central and Eastern European contexts, but all over the developed world. Despite this expansion, questions remain about who participates in PB, how different social groups engage with the process, and the extent to which digitalization reshapes patterns of inclusion and exclusion. This paper analyzes the participatory budgeting initiative in the city of Budapest, capital of Hungary, implemented annually since 2020. Budapest’s PB has operated through a predominantly digital procedure, relying on online platforms for idea submission, deliberation, and voting. Building on ongoing debates about e-participation and digital inequality, the study focuses on cohort-based differences in engagement, with special attention to older residents. To explore motivations, barriers, and lived experiences of participation, we conducted semi-structured interviews with PB participants from diverse demographic backgrounds and performed qualitative analyses to identify recurring patterns in how individuals learn about PB, formulate and submit proposals, navigate online interfaces, and make voting decisions. Our results indicate that there are some age-related differences in idea submission and voting. Yet, digital divide is also different among different subgroups of older adults, and not necessarily hampering urban, highly educated 60+, who have already used digital tools during their last working years. The question then arises, how to include such ‘supergrannies’ even more into participating. Younger cohorts find no trouble dealing with the digital solutions, as expected, and for them it's rather contributing to increased participation rates – they would not necessarily bother with idea proposing or voting if it were an offline procedure. Overall, participatory budgeting in Budapest is perceived by participants as a constructive and broadly inclusive democratic practice. Yet its digital design produces differentiated experiences across cohorts, highlighting the importance of combining online tools with targeted outreach and support. The study contributes to both PB scholarship and urban policy discussions by offering empirically grounded insights into generational participation patterns and by clarifying when digitalization expands engagement and when it risks reinforcing subtle forms of exclusion.