Value Alignment in Participatory Budgeting

Marc Serramia, Maite López-Sánchez, Juan A. Rodríguez-Aguilar, Stefano Moretti

Abstract: Participatory budgeting empowers citizens to take an active role in shaping their government's policies by influencing the allocation of a limited budget. In this process, citizens file various proposals and then collectively decide which ones should receive funding through a voting system. While participatory budgets have garnered significant attention in research and practice, one aspect so far overlooked is the ethical dimension of the proposals. Thus, beyond just gauging citizen preferences, we propose also to consider how these initiatives align with the government's core values. Specifically, we apply optimisation techniques to solve a multi-criteria decision problem that considers both citizen support and value alignment when choosing the proposals to fund. We illustrate our method in two real case studies and analyse how we can combine both criteria in an egalitarian way that does not necessarily compromise the will of citizens and may encourage governments to broaden the objectives and increase the allocated budget.