Yves Sintomer

Transnational Models of Citizen Participation: The Case of Participatory Budgeting

This article pursues two main objectives. First, it aims to deliver the first transnational overview and analysis of participatory budgeting, which in the literature on citizen participation or more specifically democratic innovations, occupies a central place. Second, it combines this broad empirical project with a theoretical approach based on the construction of ideal-types in the Weberian tradition. Namely, it presents six models of citizen participation: participatory democracy, proximity democracy, participative modernisation, multi-stakeholder participation, community development and neo-corporatism. Despite these models are initially conceived in close connection with participatory budgeting and the European context, our contention is that they can help to investigate at transnational scale the socio-political and ideological dynamics, contexts and impacts of civic engagement and democracy today.