In 2012, Seoul Metropolitan City has been the nation's final local government to introduce a participatory budget system despite of the past 10 years' of reluctant bureaucracy and allegedly 'size difficulties' with over 10 million population to embrac...
In 2012, Seoul Metropolitan City has been the nation's final local government to introduce a participatory budget system despite of the past 10 years' of reluctant bureaucracy and allegedly 'size difficulties' with over 10 million population to embrace a participatory system in the city budget. To design the participatory budget as an institution, the civic groups based on Seoul, city council, and city government organized collective choice by intentional collaboration in order to pass Seoul Participatory Budget Operation Acts and to employ the higher degree of citizen power in the institutions than traditional showing - off participatory institution.
In the operational level of participatory budget, the participatory budget committee consists of 250 citizens who have been recruited by mostly randomization sampling to ensure representativeness of the city population. This committee appropriated not only decision-making for the 10% of discreet budget but also the operational process control within the range of Seoul Participatory Budget Operational Acts.
This study has undergone the Seoul Participatory Budget case study: i) along with IAD framework by E. Ostrom(1990) providing variables as physical/material condition, attributes of community, rules-in-use, action situations, actors, patterns of interaction, and outcomes, ii) the two forms of new governance(Newman, 2001), collaborative governance and participatory governance, have been identified to make the distinction of those properties(Ansell & Gash, 2007), iii) to investigate determinant factors to citizen participation in such case.
First, the analysis using IAD framework shows differences in the variables of two levels, collective choice level and operational level: Public goods versus common goods, eligible rules as former budget watch movement organizations and consensus rule versus city population rule and majority rule, unitary or homogeneous community versus adversary community, etc. These variables present to dependent variables some differences: actors, the patterns of interactions and outcomes('Seoul Participatory Budget Operational Acts' versus 'Budget Bill for the 2013, the impact to citizens, bureaucrats and communities).
Second, the properties of two types of governance are studied: collaborative governance is to be for the condition to make provision of public goods, the kind of participation is sharing(Scaff, 1975), using the mechanism of transformation of preference (consensus) by face-to-face communication so that the community could have the attributes of unitary democracy (Mansbridge, 1983). On the other hand, the operational level shows the narrow definition of participatory governance identified for this study with the attributes of adversary democracy(Mansbridge, 1983) such as the taking part(Scaff, 1975) of participation, to protect conflicting interests, using the mechanism of aggregation of preferences by majority rule (ballot) and the possibility of grassroots governance in terms of evolution toward networks.
Lastly, the determinant factors of citizen participation have been identified as meso factors such as rules-in-use and issues as the material conditions with macro factors of political climate for the collective choice level of collaborative governance. For the operational level, the trigger factor for the citizen participation should be the appropriable budget itself but the primary one is a micro factor as resources of each individual while meso factor of institutional neutral steering works in the institutions. The theoretical and institutional implications are followed.