Participatory budgeting without participants: Identifying barriers on accessibility and usage of German participatory budgeting

Participatory budgeting aims at finding an appropriate solution to meet the increasing demands of citizens worldwide for more transparency and political participation in financial affairs. Several thousand projects related to this topic have been conducted worldwide to date. In Germany, public participation rates in these projects were often below expectations of public administration and politics, rarely surpassing a one-digit percentage of eligible voters. This leads to the question, how can this public disinterest be explained? We conducted an interdisciplinary literature review and considered scientific journals, conferences, monographs and anthologies to identify barriers to accessibility and usage of German participatory budgeting. Our findings show a wide range of reasons that were assumed by scholars to be responsible for low participation rates in participatory budgeting. We developed five meta categories, which summarize the findings topically. Twenty barriers to participation were found. The results of our literature review provide a basis for further scientific examination and allow political and public administration decision-makers to develop measures appropriate to increase participation rates.