Design of the Participatory Budget: How to turn citizens into process protagonists

Purpose – In the New Public Governance (NPG) paradigm, citizens play a vital role in the decision making of public organisations and are fundamental to aligning their expectations with service delivery. Citizen engagement could be realised in the budgeting process by adopting participatory budgeting (PB) even if previous literature on PB does not focus on this tool issue. Therefore, this study aims to understand which PB institutional design arrangements help enhance citizen participation. Design/methodology/approach – A deductive content analysis and a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis were carried out on the PB regulations of 100 Italian municipalities. Findings – The results suggest that the PB design can be elaborated in different ways that do not always guarantee the involvement of citizens. Virtuous municipalities engage citizens from the start of the process and in the most relevant discussion and deliberation phases. A simple legislative provision does not guarantee a real introduction of participatory governance. Originality – This study theorises citizen participation in PB and examines it through empirical evidence to define relationships between PB design arrangements and citizen engagement.