Searching for a Role for Citizens in the Budget Process

Abstract

Citizen participation in the local budget process is not prevalent, despite encouragement from scholars and professional organizations. This case study of two Kansas cities that have used a variety of input mechanisms in the budget process analyzes the effectiveness of citizen budget participation. Limited effectiveness was found, which may largely be due to the timing of the input, unstated or unclear goals, implementation difficulties, and political and environmental constraints. Citizen input appears to have had little effect on budget decisions, and neither city has institutionalized participation in the process. However, the input mechanisms serve other purposes, such as education and support for specific proposals. Describing the benefits as well as the difficulty of involving citizens in a meaningful way is beneficial to other governments as they wrestle with the issue of defining the citizens' role in the budget process.

Popular Financial Reports as Fiscal Transparency Mechanisms: An Assessment Using the Fiscal Transparency Index for the Citizen User

“…Transparency, then, is necessary for the government to be responsive to citizens. The information given to citizens must be accurate, and accessible (Justice, Melitski, & Smith, 2006;Yang, 2009), and timely to allow for citizen participation in the budgetary process (Ebdon & Franklin, 2004). This goes back to the often cited definition of fiscal transparency by Kopits and Craig (1998) that it allows users (including voters) to "accurately assess the government's financial position and true costs and benefits of government activities" (p. 1).…”

Conceptualizing the use of public involvement in health policy decision-making

“…suggests an openness to communicating with the public and considering their input regardless of 231 the substance of their views (Ebdon & Franklin, 2004;Graves, 2002;Halvorsen, 2006;Horne, 232 2010). Our analysis shows that a "willingness to listen" is tied to two key factors-personal 233 attitudes towards public involvement and organization culture.…”

Policy Target Populations and Public Participation in Agency Decision Making

“…Our rationale for having an additive index stems from the assumption that each method for soliciting public input has its potential strengths and weaknesses. Scholars agree that there is no perfect method for obtaining public input (Ebdon and Franklin 2004;Robbins, Simonsen, and Feldman 2008). The utilization of different formats allows for a greater number of exchanges between administrators and citizens.…”

“…The literature extensively discusses the pros and cons of various methods used to include the public in administration. Venues for public participation are valued more if they are more representative (Moynihan 2003), provide specific information to administrative decision makers (Robbins, Simonsen, and Feldman 2008), and involve two-way communication (Ebdon and Franklin 2004;. We use the classifications developed by the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) to assign weights to different modes of communication used by state agencies in our sample.…”