On the Balance of Elite Democracy and Popular Democracy in Process of Participatory Budget in China: An Empirical Analysis Based on Chinese Cases

摘要

As a rising way for citizen involvement in China, participatory budget has been tentatively carried out in some areas, so as to improve the delivery performance of local public service, especially on the level of community service. The present literatures are mostly focused on the definition of participatory budget and the development history, general analysis of participatory budget effectiveness, and more often the various participatory budget cases around the world. Yet, little is known about how citizen participation influence the outcome of participatory budget, particularly how different groups of citizen, elite and public, interact each other and finally input their needs into the budget decision-making system. With the theoretical framework proposed by Carol Ebdon, the relationship between citizen involvement in the budget process and city structure and culture, the study explores Chinese cases and depicts how elite group and public group interactively take part in the participatory budget. With Chinese case study, it is proposed how to balance the elite participation and public involvement and construct the effective budget agenda setting mechanism. The research outcome is as follows: The balance between elite democracy and public democracy is one of the key factors that ensure the successful participatory budget. The construction of effective elite-public interaction mechanism will help realization of demand express and collection, and furthermore improve the success probability and performance.