Participatory Budgeting and Traditional Participation in Czech Municipalities

Abstract

<jats:p>As an instrument of smart governance, participatory budgeting has been implemented by several dozen of municipalities in the Czech Republic. This is in line with the trend in many European cities. The paper examines the implementation of participatory budgeting in Czech municipalities. It is observed that participatory budgeting is being implemented in the Czech Republic typically on a very limited scale. The particular aim of this paper is to analyze the relation of participatory budgeting to the traditional political participation in local elections. Following an examination of the extent in which the instrument is implemented in the Czech municipalities, statistical tools are used to relate implementation of participatory budgeting to several measures of traditional political participation, such as voter turnout and intensity of the political competition in municipal elections. The paper concludes that the implementation of participatory budgeting has very little relation to the traditional, electoral participation in the Czech Republic.</jats:p>

An Introduction to This Thematic Issue

“…Similarly, there are several studies examining participatory budgeting in the Czech Republic (e.g. Brabec, 2019;Kukučková, Bakoš, 2020;Gašparík, 2021); indeed, one of these appeared in the previous issue of this journal (Minárik, 2020). A similar situation can be seen when looking at Poland (e.g.…”

RATIONALES AND BARRIERS TO CITIZEN PARTICIPATION IN PUBLIC BUDGETING: A systematic literature review

“…When budgetary inflexibility reaches a large portion of revenues, it disrupts the processes of setting public policy priorities and reallocating resources in different sectors, consequently decreasing public authorities' ability to make changes in public expenditures (ECHEVERRY; BONILLA; MOYA, 2006). Recent studies on participatory mechanisms have pointed out that since mandatory spending has taken up much of public budgets, the space for PBs to promote significant change is likely to be hindered due to the few financial resources available for citizen deliberation (MOGUES; ERMAN, 2020;PERES, 2020;MINÁRIK, 2020;HAGELSKAMP et al, 2020).…”

Selected Factors Determining the Adoption and Use of Participatory Budgeting in Central and Eastern Europe

“…Although one can find a few small-scale comparisons whose authors dealt mainly with institutional settings (Džinić, Murray Svidroňová, Markowska-Bzducha, 2016;Fölscher, 2007;Kersting et al 2016;Mączka et al 2021;Radzik-Maruszak, Bátorová, 2015;Lehtonen, 2021), numerous country studies (Brabec, 2019;Džinić, 2018;Garaj, Bardovič, 2020;Gondášová, Svidroňová, 2016;Kempa, Kozłowski, 2020;Kukučková, Bakoš, 2019;Milosavljević et al 2020;Minárik, 2020;Sześciło, 2015) and case studies (Balážová, 2021a;Bardovič, 2021;Bednarska-Olejniczak, Olejniczak, 2016;Boc, 2019;Hrabinová, 2020;Kociuba, Rabczewska, 2019;Krenjova, Reinsalu, 2013;Maerøe et al 2021;Polko, 2015;Švaljek, Rašić Bakarić, Sumpor, 2019;Tomášková, Buzková, 2020;Zapletalová, Soukop, Šaradín, 2020) have prevailed. It is also possible to find studies whose authors evaluated the legal conditions of individual CEE countries from the perspective of the adoption or continued use of PB (Birskyte, 2013;Šramel, 2018;Zawadzka-Pąk, Tomášková, 2019).…”