A PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING MODEL FOR CANADIAN CITIES
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The quality of representation in Canadian governing structures is currently inadequate. Low voter-turnout and the failure of pluralism have created an imbalance in James Fishkin’s four dynamic conditions of democracy – political equality, participation, deliberation and nontyranny. In this paper, participatory budgeting (PB), a Latin American innovation, was proposed as one potential mechanism to help remedy this imbalance. This is accomplished by increasing citizen participation in deliberations on issues of local importance (within a structure of political equality and non-tyranny), and empowering citizens to make real decisions on how to address such issues. PB is a co-determinative participatory system that allocates control of a portion of a city’s budget to local citizens. Using these resources, citizens, with the aid of elected representatives and the civil service, decide the type and form of projects and services that will be undertaken by the city to meet identified local needs. At the time of writing there were two known PB models in the world. The first model was developed and implemented in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, and is currently being used in many other Brazilian cities. The use of PB in Porto Alegre has been shown to bring numerous benefits to the city and its citizens. Corruption, clientelism and economic inefficiency has been reduced, while local democracy, citizenship values, public works and quality of life have advanced. The second model is a hypothetical PB process designed for the city of Salford, England. A critical analysis of both models found certain common and valuable systems which should be incorporated into a Canadian PB model. However both models utilized native systems that are not compatible with the unique cultural and democratic realities of Canadian cities. Drawing on the strengths, while avoiding the weaknesses, of the two established PB models, a new Canadian PB model was developed, employing a novel citizen decision-making system called the Deliberative Budget Council.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".