La Bourse / Volume VI / Nº VI.06 / Quiz, reflection, essays

A man in a pale suit walking through a glass-roofed hall of plants, the low sun behind him. — Plate VI.06 · Quiz, reflection, essaysThe Hall, Before the Count.A vote is a claim about who decided. A count is the only thing that can test it, and somebody has to stay late to do the counting.

ASSESSMENT · Chapter VI.06 — Participatory Budgeting, Measured

Three instruments: a ten-point quiz, eight reflection questions, five essay prompts. The quiz checks comprehension rather than recall. The reflections are private and first-person. The essays are arguable from more than one side.

THE QUIZ — ten points

Four on recall.

1. Write the participatory share and define each term.

s = P / B — the sum actually allocated by the participatory process in a period, over total public spending by the same authority in the same period. One mark for the expression, one for naming B as total spending rather than a discretionary pot — substituting a pot for the budget is how a 0.04 per cent process gets described as citizen control.

2. State what happened to Porto Alegre's participatory budget after 2004, in terms of completion rates rather than assemblies.

It was not abolished; it was left unexecuted. Project completion fell from 97 per cent under the earlier administrations to 43 per cent, and to 26 per cent in the top five priority sectors. In 2005, R$338.1 million was budgeted for public investment and R$109.4 million spent.

3. Give the Gonçalves (2014) findings with their panel, and state the identification limit the author names.

A panel of 3,651 comparable areas and 47,707 area-year observations, 1990–2004, with 228 adopters. Adopting municipalities moved 2 to 3 percentage points of budget into health and sanitation and registered 1 to 2 fewer infant deaths per 1,000. The limit: adoption was a mayoral decision, not a random assignment, and matching assumes selection on observables only.

4. Name the three mechanisms the chapter offers for the social gradient, and the published unit cost of each.

Stratified sortition — €1,883 per seat recruited. Paid participation — €86.04 per sitting day at the French jury rate, €155 a day in German-speaking Belgium. Weighted allocation by an index of need — costs nothing but a formula.

Four on application.

5. A councillor tells you her city "gives residents control of the budget" and cites a turnout of 40,000. What two numbers do you ask for, and why?

The participatory share s and the execution rate x. Turnout describes the room; s describes the authority's money; x describes whether the money moved. The stronger answer notes that all three can be high while the authority is not participatory at all, and that only s · x cannot be.

6. Your city's PB reports that its voters are poorer and more diverse than its general-election voters. A colleague concludes the process has no equity problem. What is missing?

The tier. Breadth at the ballot says nothing about who writes the ballot. In New York the voting stage outperformed the local election — 39 per cent of PB voters below $35,000 against 21 per cent — while the proposal stage was dominated by already-organised groups; in Porto Alegre the assemblies drew from the poor while the elected councillors ranked above the city average on education and income.

7. A consultant proposes citing Brazil's infant-mortality result in the business case for a process allocating 0.04 per cent of your budget. Advise.

Do not. The Brazilian result was measured at 17 to 21 per cent intensity — roughly 480 times the proposed dose — in a country with a severe sanitation deficit. Credit any answer that offers the alternative: make the equity and legitimacy case at this dose, and make the health case only if you raise s.

8. Why does the chapter insist that unspent participatory balances carry forward inside the participatory line rather than returning to general funds?

Because a sweepable balance makes non-execution profitable for the authority. The carry-forward is what gives the execution covenant teeth — without it, Porto Alegre's 32.4 per cent execution rate is a rational administrative choice rather than a failure.

Two that require the arithmetic to be done.

9. A city of 8,340,000 people allocates $39,000,000 by participatory vote against a total budget of $89,160,000,000. Compute the participatory share, the figure per resident, and state whether this is governance or consultation. Show your working.

s = 39,000,000 / 89,160,000,000 = 0.0437%, which is one part in 2,286. Per resident: 39,000,000 / 8,340,000 = $4.68 a year. Full marks require the conclusion in the right register: at this share it is consultation with a purchase order attached — worth doing, and not budgeting. Credit any answer that also computes the share against annualised capital spending, 39,000,000 / 16,275,000,000 = 0.240%, and notes that choosing the flattering denominator is the commonest move in this literature.

10. A €40,000,000 process costs €500,000 a cycle and reaches 118,308 participants. You are asked to add a stratified proposal tier: 60 seats at €1,883 to recruit, 8 sitting days each at €86.04, plus a €12,000 care and travel fund. Compute the cost per participant before and after, and the repair as a share of the pot.

Before: 500,000 / 118,308 = €4.23. The repair: 60 × 1,883 = 112,980; 60 × 8 × 86.04 = 41,299; plus 12,000 — €166,279, which is 166,279 / 40,000,000 = 0.42% of the pot and a 33.3 per cent increase on the cycle. After: 666,279 / 118,308 = €5.63. The stronger answer states the ratio rather than the cost: the process still places 60 euros of public money under public decision for every euro it spends, down from 80, and the fairness problem is fixed for 0.42 per cent.

REFLECTION — eight questions, for one person and a pen

These are not for a room. Write the answers by hand if you can; the slowness is the point.

Think of a decision about shared money that you were invited into. Did you have the agenda, or the papers? How did you know which?

Where have you been counted as having participated in something you did not in fact decide? What would have had to be different for it to be real?

Which committee in your life do you attend because you can afford the evenings? Who is not there, and what would it take for them to be?

Recall a time you were on the inside of a process and knew the number that would have changed the outside view of it. What stopped you publishing it?

What have you allocated and then not executed? Be specific about the year and the amount, and about what it was that made non-execution easier than saying no.

Where in your own work do you report the turnout when you know the share is the honest measure?

What would you personally need to be paid — in money, time or cover — to sit on eight evening committees deciding your district's spending? Write the number down. Then ask what it says that the number exists.

Think of something in your neighbourhood you walk past that somebody decided collectively. What do you feel when you pass it, and what would it take to have more of that?

ESSAY PROMPTS — five

Each is arguable from more than one side. Each requires at least one source the chapter cites and at least one it does not.

1. Consultation at scale, or government in miniature. The chapter argues that a process governing 0.0437 per cent of a budget is consultation and one governing 21 per cent is government. Argue either that the share is the decisive variable, or that a small, reliably executed, legally protected process does more democratic work than a large discretionary one. Use Wampler (2007) and one source on deliberative systems the chapter does not cite.

2. Who should write the ballot. The chapter proposes stratified sortition for the proposal tier while leaving the ballot open. Argue the case against: that lottery selection removes the self-selected commitment that makes proposals good, and that an unrepresentative tier producing well-worked proposals may serve a district better than a representative tier producing weak ones. Use the OECD (2020) study and one published critique of sortition.

3. Whether the Brazilian evidence should be cited at all outside Brazil. Take a position on the transportability of the Gonçalves and Touchton–Wampler results. Engage the identification strategy directly — the panel, the matching, the adopters-only restriction — and use one source on external validity in development economics that the chapter does not cite.

4. The execution covenant and the separation of powers. Melgar's account shows executive discretion over implementation both created Porto Alegre's participatory budget and hollowed it out. Argue whether binding a future executive to spend what residents allocated is a democratic protection or a democratic harm. Use Melgar (2014) and one source on budgetary constitutionalism or fiscal rules the chapter does not cite.

5. Paying citizens. German-speaking Belgium pays €155 a day and reports 10 per cent acceptance against the 2 to 5 per cent typical of unpaid processes. Argue either that payment is the minimum condition of a fair civic tier, or that it converts a duty into a job and changes who shows up in ways that are not obviously better. Use the chapter's Convention Citoyenne figures and one source on incentives and intrinsic motivation the chapter does not cite.