Citizen Participation and Its Discontents - Investigating Pioneering Participatory Budgeting Projects in Taiwan

• In Event: 2229 - Section on Political Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Political Sociology Refereed Roundtable #8

Abstract

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a participatory mode through which laypeople can get involved in the decision-making process of governmental budgeting. While PB has been promoted and conducted in many cities in various countries for decades, we did not witness the “PB boom” in Taiwan until 2015. Consistent with many other PB efforts, the efforts to promote PB in Taiwan claim to aim at deepening democracy, broadening civic participation, and fostering administrative reform. Employing several pioneering PB projects in Taiwan from 2015 through 2017 as my examples - since I had the chance to participate in and investigate these projects closely - in addition to briefly mentioning the benefits of promoting PB in Taiwan, this article will examine who rejects the promotion of PB and analyze the reasons behind such rejection.
Based on in-depth interviews and field notes from participant observations, I argue that, among these reasons for rejection, some are more explicit and some are rather implicit; some are based on more rational reasons and others on non-rational reasons. More intriguingly, whereas the shared characteristic of them is avoiding opposing the virtue of opening up space for lay citizens to “voice” their opinions and “make decisions” directly, these different categories develop heterogeneous discourses to go against PB at different stages. Consequently, using various discourses, the rejections oppose PB at its propagandizing and recruiting stage, its deliberative-discussing stage, its project-executing stage, and its budget-cancellation stage. In brief, to consider how to further promote PB (surely, PB with good quality), we should first confront the reasons for its rejection and understand the logics behind such opposition; then we can manage ways to justify and improve the citizen participation in Taiwan. Moreover, this article serves as a chance to encapsulate the reasons behind the objection to citizen participation.

Author

• Hsin Yi Yeh, National Taipei University