Letting citizens’ decide how their money is used.

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Challenge

Financial planning is one of the most important political decisions made at the local and regional level of politics. It influences all other policy areas. But decision making in this area is hardly transparent for the public. Electronic participatory budgeting attempts to change this by offering an easy and intuitive way to let citizens join the budget discussion and state their ideas and preferences about how tax payer’s money should be spent.

Solution

DEMOS-Budget is an Internet platform which enables citizens to take part in municipal budget planning. Using genuine figures as its basis, the application displays a real budget. Members of the public can draw up their own budgets and adjust the initial one as they see fit. Each change to a budget item is added to or deducted from the total budget in real time. Alternatively, savings can either be reinvested in a different area or used for amortization. DEMOS-Budget has been used in the City of Hamburg and in the City of Freiburg successfully.

Results

DEMOS-Budget is an initiative of mutual benefit: as members of the public develop a feel for local authority budgets, both intuitively and through learning by playing, they gain an understanding of the scope and limits of budgetary planning. And in return, municipalities acquire more information about the desires and needs of their citizens, since the DEMOS-Budget interactive budget planner enables cities to create opportunities for debate with the public about future avenues for development or new projects. Otherwise independent discussion at the expert, public and political levels can be successfully integrated by using DEMOS-Budget.

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