‘The evaluation of citizen satisfaction with participatory budgets: surveys and new methodologies applied in Catalan municipalities’ by Raül Rodríguez Fernández and Laia Márquez Muñoz.
On 27 June 2024, Raül and Laia, members of the CNSC, gave a presentation of an article within the DEMOC project at the XV Congress of the Spanish Federation of Sociology (FES, in spanish) held in Seville. The article is part of the DEMOC research, which receives funding from the Generalitat de Catalunya.
The research aims to gather evidence on how Catalan municipalities are assessing the satisfaction of participants in participatory budgeting, to conduct case studies in municipalities that are initiating participatory budgeting in 2024 and to implement a set of methodologies that are more comprehensive than mere surveys.
A total of 53 municipalities have made use of some form of survey methodology to assess citizen perception at some point in the implementation of these policies. We found that 85% of the municipalities do not assess the perception of the participating citizens. Only 15 % of the municipalities capture, in some way, the perceptions of the participants. In light green are the municipalities that provide a survey to citizens at the end of the budget vote, in which there is a satisfaction question.
Encontramos diversas memorias que evalúan los procesos internos ejecutados, por lo que no significa que no se hayan implementado actuaciones de valoración internas. Sin embargo, estas no captan las percepciones de la ciudadanía, su satisfacción ni los posibles cambios de actitudes ante la política y las instituciones. Parte del trabajo de nuestro grupo ha consistido en apoyar a ciertos municipios en herramientas para evaluar estas actitudes.
