Value Alignment in Participatory Budgeting

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. This can be useful if we want to consider more opinions outside of only those of the citizens that participate in the process. For example, it would be beneficial to integrate the opinions of non-participant citizens, neighbourhood associations, NGOs, and the government itself, all of which can be modeled as preferences over values related to the participatory budget. But how can we consider all these stakeholders in the process of deciding the participatory budget allocation?