Democracy Reinvented

Participatory Budgeting and Civic Innovation in America

Hollie Russon Gilman

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press/Ash Center
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780815726838
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A Brookings Institution Press and Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation publicationParticipatory Budgeting—the experiment in democracy that could redefine how public budgets are decided in the United States. Democracy Reinvented is the first comprehensive academic treatment of participatory budgeting in the United States, situating it within a broader trend of civic technology and innovation. This global phenomenon, which has been called "revolutionary civics in action” by the New York Times, started in Brazil in 1989 but came to America only in 2009. Participatory budgeting empowers citizens to identify community needs, work with elected officials to craft budget proposals, and vote on how to spend public funds. Democracy Reinvented places participatory budgeting within the larger discussion of the health of U.S. democracy and focuses on the enabling political and institutional conditions. Author and former White House policy adviser Hollie Russon Gilman presents theoretical insights, indepth case studies, and interviews to offer a compelling alternative to the current citizen disaffection and mistrust of government. She offers policy recommendations on how to tap online tools and other technological and civic innovations to promote more inclusive governance.While most literature tends to focus on institutional changes without solutions, this book suggests practical ways to empower citizens to become change agents. Democracy Reinvented also includes a discussion on the challenges and opportunities that come with using digital tools to re-engage citizens in governance.

1

Civic Innovation and Democratic Discontent

I was forced to go.¹

That was how one teenager in Boston grimly described his reason for attending an experimental pilot program in youth participatory budgeting. On an unseasonably warm spring day, after a seemingly endless winter, it was easy to see why he might want to be anywhere other than a community center in East Boston's inner city. A staffer from the mayor's office—who looked only a few years older—valiantly tried to convince this reluctant participant that the meeting mattered for his community.

The young man stayed. He stayed for the whole meeting, then for a slice of pizza afterward, then for several months as a volunteer. He worked with city officials to turn ideas submitted by Boston residents into viable projects for municipal capital infrastructure—everything from park benches to school computers. Later, young Bostonians, aged twelve to twenty-five years old, voted on these projects. A total of $1 million was allocated for these projects.

Programs like this one do not represent a sudden or wholesale transformation in the nature or structure of self-government. Across the country, people have always worked to strengthen their communities and volunteered their time for civic ends. Yet in some of America's largest municipalities, policymakers, citizens, and administrators are working toward a reinvigorated and even reinvented model of democracy exemplified by the experience of the young man in Boston.² This book explores efforts to reconceive the institutional space between citizens and government through innovative mechanisms for empowered civic engagement. It seeks to offer an extended scholarly reflection on one of these experiments, participatory budgeting, as a democratic innovation in the United States.

Participatory budgeting (abbreviated hereafter as PB) stands on the cusp of becoming a major national trend with the potential to shape how public budgets are decided in the United States. It empowers citizens to identify community needs, to work with elected officials to craft budgeted proposals to address these needs, and to vote on where and how to allocate public funds. A news story in the New York Times described it as “revolutionary civics in action.”³

PB leads directly to the spending of public money. Citizens work directly with government officials, who translate the input that these citizens provide into concrete policy outcomes. This stands in contrast to other models of civic engagement that put citizens in an advisory or consultative role. The power of PB derives, in part, from its ability to create a space for civic engagement that is directly tied to government decisionmaking. Importantly, PB programs in the United States are also extending a vote to those who are typically disenfranchised, including the undocumented and those under the age of eighteen.

In interviews conducted by the author, many community activists who sit on community boards (CB), block associations, and parent teacher associations (PTAs), repeatedly noted that they found PB to be the most meaningful civic engagement they had ever experienced. One woman in New York City's Harlem neighborhood praised the process, saying: “I finally got to see how the sausage is made.”

This book studies participatory budgeting as part of a larger set of civic experiments and innovations. Across localities, in the United States and beyond, civic experiments are reengaging citizens to develop public goods, co-create, and share resources. These endeavors are known by a variety of names, including “civic tech,” “open government,” and “community renewal.” What many of these processes have in common is that they open up a new channel of communication between citizens and elected officials and among citizens themselves. Taken together, these developments present an opportunity for democratic deepening that strengthens communities and rebuilds “civic muscles”—the insight and inspiration that can arise from robust civic engagement.

Among these varied civic innovations, PB is a noteworthy and prominent example. It gives citizens a more direct voice in spending, gives elected officials more accurate information about voter preferences, and gives government technocrats more complete information about public wants and needs. Participatory budgeting is not, however, a time-saving innovation. It is resource intensive. Its civic appeal lies precisely in the deliberative process and the surrounding information ecosystem it creates. The outputs of PB—specific, executed projects—are less illustrative of that value than its broader outcomes, which include enhanced “civic rewards” such as greater civic knowledge and transformed relationships.⁴ As this book discusses, PB is effective at engaging citizens to form new civic relationships and become meaningful participants in democracy. This includes people who have never before engaged in the civic realm—I call these “new citizens” and detail their participation in chapter 4. Perhaps PB's greatest democratic contribution comes in creating a new process for how citizens and institutions share information, interact, and make public decisions. If it can be institutionalized, PB has the opportunity to create a sustainable structure for robust, transparent citizen engagement between elections.

The rise of participatory budgeting also reflects an increasing public interest in collaborative governance, wherein citizens—often with the aid of new technologies—are empowered as co-producers of public policy and agents who inform decisionmaking. “In collaborative governance, policy design aims to ‘empower, enlighten, and engage citizens in the process of self-government,’ ”⁵ says Carmen Sirianni. Lessons from PB provide a framework that can be applied to other innovations in governance and public policy, as explored in chapter 8.

Addressing the Democratic Trust Deficit

The downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened.⁶

With these words, Standard & Poor's Financial Services downgraded the creditworthiness of the United States from a rating of “AAA” to “AA+” for the first time. Although ordinary citizens do not issue a collective rating of their confidence in the U.S. government, available evidence suggests that they too are losing faith in government.⁷ In a 2013 survey, government dysfunction surpassed the economy as the single problem Americans were most likely to list as the country's most serious. Similarly, Harvard's Institute of Politics found that Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine possess a record-low level of trust in government institutions.⁸ In a 2014 Gallup survey, only 17 percent of adults expressed a great deal of confidence in the president. Only 10 percent expressed a great deal of confidence in Congress.⁹

Conventional wisdom suggests that most citizens do not want to be politically engaged. Many political scientists agree. These experts argue that not only do citizens not want to engage in politics, but also they are ill equipped to make rational policy decisions.¹⁰ Kenneth Arrow's famous “impossibility theorem”—positing that there is no rationally acceptable way to construct social preferences from individual preferences—has been especially influential.¹¹ Similarly, Philip Pettit's “discursive dilemma” states that individuals in deliberative settings are so alienated from policy concerns that they can potentially support policies that are inconsistent with their own beliefs.¹²

Citizens’ declining faith in political participation comes at a moment when remarkable advances in communications technologies offer increased agency in social and commercial spheres.¹³ In the United States, there are 103.1 mobile phones for every 100 people.¹⁴ Sixty-four percent of Americans have smart phones, and penetration rates are rising.¹⁵ In 1969 all of NASA had access to less computing power than a single smart phone does today.¹⁶ Digital technologies have accelerated the flow of communication and reduced barriers to entry for collective action, introducing new possibilities for organization and activism in a networked world. Large-scale aggregation of goods, as exemplified by Amazon.com, has changed shopping habits. More goods are available on demand in real time, creating an expectation among consumers of hyper-convenience and instant gratification. Parallel, collaborative production, as exemplified by Wikipedia, is transforming knowledge creation and learning.¹⁷

But these remarkable social innovations have yet to penetrate the sphere of politics. The ways in which citizens engage with government institutions remain largely unchanged.¹⁸ Some critics of democracy warn that voting every two years seems to continue to be the alpha and omega of civic participation. In this model of minimal engagement, they suggest, citizens are purposefully alienated from the decisionmaking that most affects their lives.¹⁹ Given these critiques, it can be argued that the predominant model of contemporary representative democracy—with its overwhelming focus on elections—does not sufficiently empower people to express their preferences between trips to the polls, provide the most effective flow of governance information to citizens, or keep decisionmakers informed of public preferences, beyond limited poll sampling. Citizens increasingly expect instant feedback, but government institutions little changed from models developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are unprepared to provide it.²⁰

Some argue that such Weberian hierarchical-bureaucratic models have been unable to foster inclusive and robust relationships between citizens and their elected officials.²¹ At a minimum, these models seem poorly suited for the fast pace of organization in the age of social networks.²² They are struggling to fulfill basic democratic imperatives that the will of the people is effectively expressed and that citizens have transparent and accurate information about governance.²³

Engaging citizens in governance is difficult. In Max Weber's famous phrase, “politics is the strong and slow boring of hard boards.”²⁴ To effectively engage citizens in politics and capitalize on the dispersed wisdom of the multitude, innovation will have to extend beyond devices and gadgets to encompass democratic processes.²⁵

While civic life has not experienced the same technologically driven seismic shifts as other sectors, both in the United States and around the globe, citizens are working together to leverage new approaches and digital tools—from crowdfunding civic projects to creating the civic equivalent of the “sharing economy”—to strengthen their communal life.²⁶ Chapter 8 of this book offers a rubric laying out these diverse initiatives and their implications.

National governments are seeking to build on these developments. In 2011 President Obama launched the Open Government Partnership with seven other nations. To date a total of sixty-six nations have signed on to the endeavor. Countries in this multilateral partnership commit to greater citizen participation, collaboration, and transparency in governance. Each member country is required to submit a national action plan outlining its domestic open government commitments. According to President Obama, “empowering citizens with new ways to participate in their democracy” is critical to the effort.²⁷ My research suggests that participatory budgeting can be an important tool in efforts at open and inclusive governance, in the United States and globally. To that end, as a policy advisor on open government and innovation in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), I worked to incorporate participatory budgeting into the second National Action Plan, which the United States submitted as part of the Open Government Partnership.²⁸ The National Action Plan, released in December 2013, features a commitment to promote community-led PB, as explored further in chapter 7.²⁹ The post-2015 Development Agenda of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has led to an ongoing international effort to formulate sustainable development goals (SDGs).³⁰ SDG 16.7 calls on signatories to “ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels.”^3...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 - Civic Innovation and Democratic Discontent
• 2 - Origins: A More Participatory Budget Approach
• 3 - Participatory Budgeting Comes to America
• 4 - The Nature of Participation
• 5 - Engagement: Deliberation and Decisionmaking
• 6 - Innovation and Permutations: Bostons Youth PB
• 7 - Institutionalizing Innovations
• 8 - Civic Innovation in America
• 9 - Why Engage Citizens?
• Appendix: Methods
• References
• Index
• Back Cover