When a democratic innovation such as participatory budgeting travelled from Brazil to Europe, many scholars pointed that different goals and features had disappeared. Porto Alegre model was distinct from what european cities were trying to implement and a much smaller portion of capital budget were really discussed within european PB.
Other works have been studying how this specific participatory device has been adapted within a country (Navarro Yáñez, 2004 ; Ganuza & Francès, 2012 ; Spada, 2014 ; Krenkova, 2017). Looking at how this policy transfer in France has been adopted in 2017, I've documented 61 active cases based on web mining and french newspaper database. This paper will analyze how local rules are framing participation and what kind of proposals are possible within PB based on documentation and 60 interviews for each local authority.
10 years ago, Sintomer's team was labelling french cases as typical of "proximity democracy" and I'll show that it's nowadays more complex than then. If lack of precise rules and the omnipresence of elected officials were prominent in the first generation of PB in France, now most of processes are more formal and we might wonder if "selective listening" or cherrypicking typical from that time is still occurring as budgets are bigger (Parisians are voting for €100,000,000 each year).
Using quantitative text analysis, I show that most of winning proposals are related to very traditionnal policies and capital investments such as sport facilities, community gardens and basic urban infrastructures whereas submitted proposals are broader than these issues. But city halls are filtering before the vote, in order to choose which proposals are "feasible" or "desirable" from their point of view. This means than informal cherrypicking is still happening and interviews confirm how political filter is maintained. PB is far from being linked to some open government strategy: less than 10% of cases are implemented PB and open budget.
My research will study in the following years how accountability and expertise could have an impact on the fate of some of these proposals.
Font Fàbregas Joan, Della Porta Donatella & Sintomer Yves, 2014, Participatory Democracy in Southern Europe: Causes, Characteristics and Consequences., London, Rowman & Littlefield International, xiv+247 p.
Ganuza Ernesto & Francés Francisco, 2012, El círculo virtuoso de la democracia: los presupuestos participativos a debate, Madrid, Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (coll. « Monografías »).
Krenjova Jelizaveta & Raudla Ringa, 2017, « Policy Diffusion at the Local Level: Participatory Budgeting in Estonia », Urban Affairs Review, 2017, p. 1-29.
Navarro Yáñez Clemente J., 2004, « Participatory democracy and political opportunism: municipal experience in Italy and Spain (1960-93) », International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 28, no 4, p. 819‑838.
Sintomer Yves, Herzberg Carsten et Röcke Anja, 2008, Les budgets participatifs en Europe : des services publics au service du public, Paris, La Découverte (coll. « Recherches »).
Spada Paolo, 2014, « The Diffusion of Participatory Governance Innovations: A Panel Data Analysis of the Adoption and Survival of Participatory Budgeting in Brazil », unpublished.
