Designing Participatory Budgeting Mechanisms Grounded in Judgment Aggregation

Abstract

We introduce a new approach for designing rules for participatory budgeting, the problem of deciding on the use of public funds based directly on the views expressed by the citizens concerned. The core idea is to embed instances of the participatory budgeting problem into judgment aggregation, a powerful general-purpose framework for modelling collective decision making. Taking advantage of the possibilities offered by judgment aggregation, we enrich the familiar setting of participatory budgeting with additional constraints, namely dependencies between projects and quotas regarding different types of projects. We analyse the rules obtained both in algorithmic and in axiomatic terms.