For the few and under specific conditions. Participatory budgeting in Milan: evidence from an online survey on PB participants in Italy’s second largest city

IF 2.2 Q2 POLITICAL SCIENCE

Contemporary Italian Politics Pub Date : 2022-02-21 DOI:10.1080/23248823.2022.2043426

M. Cellini, Maria Cristina Antonucci

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引用次数: 1

Abstract

ABSTRACT Participatory budgeting (PB) has become one of the most widely employed and extensively debated instruments in the field of participatory democracy. Its supporters have highlighted its ability to increase political participation and the empowerment of citizens. Critics have warned of its (lack of) capacity to be inclusive and to fulfil promises of greater transparency and effective empowerment of citizens. The present article, through the analysis of data collected among participants in the PB process in Milan, draws a picture of the average PB participant in order to understand the extent to which PB succeeds in including a representative cross-section of Milan population. The article finds that PB participants are on average older, richer, better educated, and more politically active than the average Milan resident, highlighting the failure of the city’s PB to engage representative cross-sections of the population. The article concludes by stressing the urgency of the need to reform practices of participatory democracy in order to make them more inclusive and therefore better able to achieve citizen empowerment.

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针对少数人和特定条件。米兰的参与式预算：来自意大利第二大城市PB参与者的在线调查证据

参与式预算(PB)已经成为参与式民主领域最广泛使用和广泛争论的工具之一。它的支持者强调了它增加政治参与和赋予公民权力的能力。批评人士警告说，它(缺乏)包容和履行更大透明度和有效赋予公民权力的承诺的能力。本文通过对米兰PB过程中参与者收集的数据进行分析，绘制了平均PB参与者的图像，以了解PB在多大程度上成功地包括了米兰人口的代表性横截面。文章发现，与米兰普通居民相比，城市规划参与者平均年龄更大，更富有，受教育程度更高，在政治上更活跃，这突显了该市的城市规划未能吸引具有代表性的人口群体。文章最后强调，迫切需要改革参与式民主的做法，以使其更具包容性，从而更好地实现公民赋权。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Contemporary Italian Politics Social Sciences-Political Science and International Relations

CiteScore

4.40

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Contemporary Italian Politics, formerly Bulletin of Italian Politics, is a political science journal aimed at academics and policy makers as well as others with a professional or intellectual interest in the politics of Italy. The journal has two main aims: Firstly, to provide rigorous analysis, in the English language, about the politics of what is one of the European Union’s four largest states in terms of population and Gross Domestic Product. We seek to do this aware that too often those in the English-speaking world looking for incisive analysis and insight into the latest trends and developments in Italian politics are likely to be stymied by two contrasting difficulties. On the one hand, they can turn to the daily and weekly print media. Here they will find information on the latest developments, sure enough; but much of it is likely to lack the incisiveness of academic writing and may even be straightforwardly inaccurate. On the other hand, readers can turn either to general political science journals – but here they will have to face the issue of fragmented information – or to specific journals on Italy – in which case they will find that politics is considered only insofar as it is part of the broader field of modern Italian studies[...] The second aim follows from the first insofar as, in seeking to achieve it, we hope thereby to provide analysis that readers will find genuinely useful. With research funding bodies of all kinds giving increasing emphasis to knowledge transfer and increasingly demanding of applicants that they demonstrate the relevance of what they are doing to non-academic ‘end users’, political scientists have a self-interested motive for attempting a closer engagement with outside practitioners.