In the Eye of the Beholder: Explaining the Effects of Local Participatory Budgeting on General Public Political Support

Governments increasingly combine deliberative and direct-democratic instruments to address democratic dissatisfaction and declining political trust. However, how the general public evaluates these hybrid democratic innovations in relation to their political support remains largely unexplored. This study examines the mechanisms through which a hybrid form of participatory budgeting (PB) in Amsterdam influences public political support. In this hybrid PB model, large-scale public voting complements traditional small-scale deliberation in allocating public funds. Drawing on systems theory, this study first theorises how public evaluations of hybrid PB input, throughput, and output components relate to shifts in their levels of political support. The analysis of 23 semi-structured interviews with citizens reveals that increased political support frequently depends on established mechanisms of feeling heard and perceiving direct policy influence. These increases also depend on a set of newly identified mechanisms, including issue salience, budget adequacy, throughput effectiveness, democratic representativeness, equitable participation, and transparent communication. Furthermore, pre-existing perspectives on political engagement and government constrain these potential positive effects. Finally, ambiguity in citizens’ evaluations of hybrid PB throughput and output introduces another underexplored pathway. The central finding is that the public interprets the same hybrid PB differently, resulting in varied impacts on their political support.