Participatory budgeting is a process designed to drive beneficial change through the input of ordinary citizens and the selection of a well-being- and agency-enhancing projects. Ideally this innovative democratic process realizes its aim and thereby achieves authentic development. Included in these likely and normatively desirable outcomes are valuable subjective states and objective outcomes. Citizens who participate in PB feel like agents, community groups function more cooperatively, and the community exhibits more and better democracy.
In Chapter 3 I argued and found support for the claim that participants in PB report higher levels of individual and collective agency vis-à-vis non-participants. More surprisingly, I also found that non-participants who were aware of the PB assemblies of their respective communities, reported higher levels of collective agency than those who were not aware of the meetings. My methodology was to use survey data pertaining to four municipalities in the Dominican Republic (SDE and STI as the PB cities, and SDO and LVG as the non-PB cities) and apply diverse forms of regression analysis.
Trying to move from correlations of PB and desirable outcomes to an analysis of the enabling conditions that may be leading to such results, in Chapter 4 I argued that participation in PB is likely to translate into a number of good outcomes, as long as certain conditions and circumstances prevailed in the process. These conditions include fairness, inclusiveness, capacity for and actuality of effective change, deliberation, and prior cooperative group functioning. Using process tracing analysis for the PB cases of SDE and STI, I found that, in general, PB more or less increases democratic deliberation and other forms of participation but due to certain democratic deficits, PB has a mixed record with