Fair voting outcomes with impact and novelty compromises? Unravelling biases in electing participatory budgeting winners

Participatory budgeting, as a paradigm for democratic innovations, engages citizens in the distribution of a public budget to projects, which they propose and vote for implementation. So far, voting algorithms have been proposed and studied in social choice literature to elect projects that are popular, while others prioritize a proportional representation of voters’ preferences, for instance, the rule of equal shares. However, the anticipated impact and novelty in the broader society by the winning projects, as selected by different algorithms, remains totally under-explored, lacking both a universal theory of impact for voting and a rigorous unifying framework for impact and novelty assessments. This article tackles this grand challenge towards new axiomatic foundations for designing effective and fair voting methods. This is through new and striking insights derived from a large-scale analysis of biases over 345 real-world voting outcomes, characterized for the first time by a novel portfolio of impact and novelty metrics. We find strong causal evidence that equal shares comes with impact loss in several infrastructural projects of different cost levels that have been so far over-represented. However, it also comes with a novel, yet over-represented, impact gain in welfare, education and culture. We discuss the broader implications of these results and how impact loss can be mitigated at the stage of campaign design and project ideation.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Co-creating the future: participatory cities and digital governance’.