Review Article “Citizen Participation in Budgeting Theory”

Abstract

Carol Ebdon and Aimee L. Frankin examine the knowledge of citizen participation in budgeting theory. They discuss four elements that are believed to in uence the participation process (i.e. the governmental environment, the design of the process, the mechanisms used to elicit participation, and the goals and outcomes desired from participation in budgetary decision making) and identify several practical problems in applying citizen participation in budget processes: conditions in the political environment may limit the commitment of city o! cials in seeking or using input; it might be dificult to learn about complex public budgets; mechanisms applied in budgeting may often foster one-way communication, not be institutionalized, and occur too late; and finally, goals are seldom articulated in advance, differences among participants lead to varied expectations, and costs may exceed bene ts in terms of changing allocations.

The authors also find some weaknesses in the theory; that is, no systematic effort has been made to uncover interaction effects and to extend the theory to make it more robust. In order to strengthen the knowledge of participatory budgeting, Ebdon and Frankin introduce an impact model of citizen participation in budgeting, which is a combination of the three key elements that represent the inputs (environmental, process design, and mechanism variables) and process activities (each element’s indicators) that lead to different outcomes (goals and outcomes of participation variables). This model provides several hypotheses that may be tested in future research, such as hypotheses regarding the relationships between each of the inputs and the outcomes, and the interrelationships between independent and dependent variables (how changing the combination of activities changes the different types of outcomes).