Category Archives for citizen engagement

The Effects of Participatory Budgeting on Infant Mortality in Brazil

picture by Blog do Mílton Jung on Flickr

Adding pieces of evidence to the ROI of citizen participation. Highlights are mine:

Participatory budgeting, via which the common citizen is given the ability to interact with the elected politicians in the drafting of the local budget, became a popular political reform in Brazilian municipalities in the 1990s and attracted widespread attention across the world. This paper investigates whether the use of participatory budgeting in Brazilian municipalities in the period 1991-2004 has affected the pattern of municipal expenditures and had any measurable impact on living conditions. I show that the municipalities that made use of this participatory mechanism favoured an allocation of public expenditures that closely matched the ìpopular preferences and channeled a larger fraction of their total budget to key investments in sanitation and health services. I also found that this change in the composition of municipal expenditures is associated with a pronounced reduction in the infant mortality rates for municipalities which adopted participatory budgeting. This suggests that promoting a more direct interaction between service users and elected officials in budgetary design and implementation can affect both how local resources are spent and associated living standard outcomes.

You can read the full paper here [PDF].

Update:  The paper has been published in the World Development Journal. You can read the final version here [PDF].

Podcasts – Democracy and Resistance

Podcasts of the “Democracy and Resistance” conference, held last June, are available here. A good start in my opinion are the podcasts of Jane Mansbridge and Yves Sintomer .

Below, the list of podcasts. (Hat tip ABC Democracy)

Introduction: Regina Kreide
podcast

Democracy in Crisis?

Hartmut Rosa: The Politics of Speed and the Loss of Resonance: How Social Acceleration Causes Democratic Alienation

Hauke Brunkhorst: Crisis of Democracy in Europe

Jodi Dean: Occupy Wall Street: Claiming Division

Costas Douzinas: Athens Revolting: Disobedience and Resistance in the Crisis

Forms of Resistance

Chris Thornhill: Revolutionary Constituent Power and the Transnational Constitutional Order

Rada Ivekovic: Sovereignty, Resistance, Citizenship and Subjectivation in a New Context

Robin Celikates: Civil Disobedience and the Question of Violence

Banu Bargu: Biopolitics and Human Shields

Gertrud Koch: Mass and/as Medium

Juliane Rebentisch: Theatrocracy: The Scene of Democratic Sovereignty

Democracy Revisited

Andreas Niederberger: Participation Reconsidered: Constellational Citizenship and the Plurality of Means and Forms of Democratic Participation

Andreas Kalyvas: Radical Democracy and Constituent Power

Yves Sintomer: Citizen Participation – A Response to the Global Crisis?

Oliver Marchart: Democratic Protest and Its Discontents

Jane Mansbridge: Resisting Resistance

Democracy by Sortition, Government by Lot

Personally, I am a strong sympathiser of democracy by sortition.

Historically, the main references to government by sortition refer to Classical Athens and the Florentine Republic in the Early Renaissance.

View of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Picture by jrgcastro on flickr.

For those interested in the Florentine experience, in general less known to the public, here’s a great draft paper [pdf] by Yves Sintomer that he presented during a meeting we had a couple of years ago at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio. In the paper, among other things, Yves describes the experience of the Florentine Republic and contrasts it with recent democratic innovations based on random selection. As to these recent experiments, alongside citizens’ juries,  probably one of the most studied experiments with sortition in recent history refers to British Columbia’s Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform.

At a time when citizen participation is considered – at least in theory – an important part of the open government movement, those working in this sphere should pay particular attention to different methods of participant selection (e.g. self-selection, randomized) and what the prospects and limits for each of these different methods are.

An awesome read on this subject is the book Democratic Innovations by Graham Smith. Among other things, Graham looks at the impact that different  institutional designs (and methods of selection) have on the inclusiveness of participatory experiences.

If you are interested in sortition, a good resource to follow is the Equality by Log blog. In the blog I just came across an interesting presentation [PDF] by Yoram Gat on the subject of sortition compared to traditional (i.e. representative) democratic institutions.

Maybe after some of these readings you may become a sympathiser of government by lot as well.

Trust and Political Information: Attitudinal Change in Participants in the Youth Parliament in Brazil

 

This article analyses the impact of socializing experiences on the political attitudes of youngsters. More specifically, our goal is to evaluate the impact of the Youth Parliament program on youngsters’ confidence levels in the Minas Gerais State Assembly (MGSA). The analysis focuses on the cognitive foundations of attitudes and results show a substantial increase in confidence levels in MGSA, an increase associated with the acquisition of information on the institution. It is asserted that the increase in confidence in MGSA represents and attitudinal “gain”. The study design involves quasi-experimental research on a non-random sample. We conducted two rounds of interviews in 2008, prior and subsequent to the program, with 335 participants (167 in the treatment group; and 168 in the control group).

By Mario Fuks, Gabriel Avila Casalecchi, Brazilian Political Science Review, Vol 6, No 1 (2012)

Who is willing to participate, and how?

This paper [PDF] draws on a new survey of British citizens to test the hypothesis that there are two quite distinctive types of attitude prevalent among those who are ‘disaffected’ with politics, the ‘dissatisfied democratic’ and ‘stealth democratic’ orientations, the former being more widespread in the UK. While neither manifests a high level of trust for the political elite, the dissatisfied democratic citizen is politically interested, efficacious and desires greater political participation, while the contrary is generally true of the stealth democrat. However, although stealth democrats are unwilling to engage in most forms of participation or deliberation, they are ambiguous about direct democracy, which can be attributed to the populist nature of stealth democratic attitudes.

By Paul Webb, University of Sussex, 2012.

Leveraging e-Government at a Time of Financial and Economic Crisis

For those interested in the use of ICT tools in budget monitoring (a component of the PB process) I would like to draw your attention to the United Nations e-Government Survey document, which has just been released: “Leveraging e-Government at a Time of Financial and Economic Crisis”

In chapter 1 “Stimulus Funds, Transparency and Trust”, of which I am the author, I try to present some cases and analysis of ICT usage in the allocation of crisis response funds around the world during the economic downturn.

Chapter 1: Stimulus funds, transparency and public trust 9

1.1 Crisis response websites 10
1.2 From transparency to participation 14
1.3 Data access and civil society 16
1.4 Conclusions 19

I also make a quick mention to some interesting e-PB initiatives.

GSA: Engaging Citizens in Government

The US General Services Administration (GSA) has just released its Intergovernmental Solutions Newsletter.
Entitled “Engaging Citizens in Government”, all  of the articles in the current edition should be of interest to those working on the use of ICTs as a means to enhance citizen participation.
To those particularly interested in e-Participatory Budgeting, I have co-authored a small text (p.23) on the cases of Belo Horizonte (Brazil) and La Plata (Argentina).
As to citizen participation in the Brazilian legislative process, I’ve also co-authored “Participatory Lawmaking in Brazil” (p.22).
ENGAGING CITIZENS IN GOVERNMENT
Table of contents:
Increasing Citizen Engagement in Government
By the People, For the People
Citizen Engagement
National Dialogues Build Communities
Believable Change: A Reality Check on Online Participation?
Reinventing We the People
Data is Not Democracy
Could Citizens Run the White House Online?
E-Petitions Preserves an Old British Tradition
My better Estonia
Participatory Lawmaking in Brazil
Brazil and Argentina: From Participatory Budgeting to e-Participatory Budgeting
Pew: Well-off and Well-educated Are More Likely to Engage
Public Engagement on Fairfax Countys Budget
Citizen Engagement in Oakland County
Washington Goes to Mr. Smith: The Changing Role of Citizens in Policy Development
Ohio Redistricting Competition
Planning for Citizen Engagement
Potholes and PDAs
New Media Makers Pioneer Novel Forms of News
Putting Your Audience to Work: EPAs Radon Video Contest
A Millennial Model of Civic Engagement
Emerging Themes for Effective Online Citizen Engagement
The Importance of Open Web Standards in the Move to Open and Transparent Government