Advanced participatory budget: can linking participation and taxation impact local citizen engagement?

Resumen

What for a long time had been thought incompatible - management of public finance and expertise of ordinary citizens - has become possible with the development of participatory budget, particularly in cities, where public investments are more tangibile. Can this recent bond be strengthened if participation is advanced to an earlier stage of the complicated bureaucratic process that turns citizens’ tax payments into a distant municipal budget? In a mechanism dubbed “advanced participatory budget” we propose to add elements in advance of the standard participatory budget stages. Inviting citizens to participate when they fill in their tax declaration or receive their social benefit pay slip, can increase the salience of the impact of their taxes on the distribution of public expenditures. The mechanism proposed here is based on a number of hypotheses requiring empirical proof and it is not a policy recommendation, but a promising direction for future research that could potentially inform policymakers, citizens, and actors from the civil society.