Participatory Budgeting in Catalonia through the Decidim Platform

These data contain two different datasets of the project ‘Citizen evaluation of participatory budgets in Catalonia: satisfaction, problems and effects on political trust and legitimacy’ (DEMOC 2023 EXI/100/22/000007) funded by the Direcció General de Bon Govern, Innovació i Qualitat Democràtiques -Generalitat de Catalunya-. This work was also funded by the Departament de Recerca i Universitats through the support for consolidated research groups (2021 SGR 01397). The project has been carried out by members of the CNSC and GADE research groups of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC).

The research has focused on potential measures to evaluate participatory budgeting and understand the success and institutionalisation of these initiatives, with a focus on the construction of an unpublished database on participatory budgets in Catalonia to explore the explanatory factors of continuity and abandonment and, in particular, the effect of the political context and changes in local government. The first dataset, the 'Participatory Budgeting in Catalonia through the Decidim Platform: Municipalities' Mandates Dataset' (A1 English version, and A2 Catalan version) groups together different variables to examine the continuity of participatory budgeting programmes by municipalities that use the Decidim platform. The dataset is structured around political mandates (2015–2019, 2019–2023, 2023–2027) of municipalities with longitudinal data. The structure of the codebook proceeds as follows in three sections:

1. The first group of variables gathers different information about adoption, continuity, abandonment, and precedent experience of implementation in the municipalities. All these sections have been tagged manually between two data collectors, as it is also part of the ‘Participatory Budgeting in Catalonia through the Decidim Platform.
2. The second group includes different variables regarding the political context of the municipalities across the mandates, from open data sources of the Catalan and Spanish governments and official statistics. All these sections have been developed with data from public statistical records and official open data.
3. The third group contains different variables about the internal procedural features of the implementation of PB programmes in each municipality. Future updates of this dataset will expand this section. This last group, with some 'wrangling' adjustments, can be enriched by the vast number of variables available in the second dataset.

The second dataset, Participatory Budgeting in Catalonia through the Decidim Platform: Participatory Budgeting -PB- Processes Dataset (B1 English version and B2 Catalan version), aims to classify and typologize the different characteristics of participatory budgeting processes based on their initiation and implementation. It is structured around processes, with each unit of analysis representing a participatory budgeting initiative implemented through the Decidim between 2016 and 2025. The structure of the codebook proceeds along 7 groups of variables that categorize different phases of implementation:

1. From the preliminary group to the second group, the dataset gathers various initial characteristics and contextual factors that shape the initiative’s impulse, as well as organizational features and design decisions.
2. From the third to the fifth group, it includes elements of the proposal phase, characteristics of the workshop processes, and features related to the filtering and prioritization of proposals.
3. From the sixth to the seventh group, it covers aspects of the voting phase, along with features related to project monitoring and process evaluation. Furthermore, a final set of supplementary factors is included to facilitate data organization and integration with the ‘Participatory Budgeting in Catalonia through the Decidim Platform: Municipalities’ Mandate Dataset’.