A Dutch panel study of four binding participatory budgets found that citizens with initially high populist attitudes significantly decrease those attitudes immediately after participating, while citizens with low populist attitudes are unaffected. Three questions about this heterogeneous effect remain open: whether the decrease persists, fades, reverses, or grows over time (particularly depending on whether participants see their proposals implemented); whether it generalizes to other countries, political systems, and consultative participatory budgeting designs in which popular decisions are not binding; and which experiences during the process — contact with authorities, perceived respect, deliberation with fellow citizens, or perceived decision-making power — causally account for the decline among initially high-populist participants. Follow-up work by the same research group has begun to address the mechanism component but has not produced follow-up-wave evidence, non-Dutch or consultative-design tests, or large-sample replications.

Background

Populist attitudes are a set of citizen-level beliefs central to the ideational approach to populism: the idea that politics is a moral struggle between a homogeneous, virtuous 'people' and a corrupt, unresponsive 'elite', so that the general will of the people should dominate decision-making. They are commonly measured with survey scales such as the six-item scale of Akkerman, Mudde, and Zaslove (2014), on which respondents rate agreement (1–5) with statements about politicians, the people, and popular sovereignty. Citizens with high populist attitudes are typically 'dissatisfied democrats': they are especially sensitive to the gap between the democratic ideal of popular control and the practice of representative democracy.

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic innovation in which citizens directly decide how part of a public budget is spent. In the 'Porto Alegre adapted to Europe' model, the citizen vote on project proposals is binding, whereas in many other countries PB is merely consultative, with governments practicing what has been called 'selective listening' — the popular will is not necessarily executed. Mini-publics such as citizens' assemblies are a related deliberative innovation, in which a small group of citizens deliberates on a policy issue.

Theuwis and Kindt (2024) provided the first empirical study of whether participating in a democratic innovation changes citizens' populist attitudes. Using pre- and post-event surveys of participants (N = 71 respondents completing both waves) in four Dutch PBs with binding outcomes (Duiven, Maastricht, and two Amsterdam-East cases), they found that participants with high populist attitudes (scale mean at or above 3.5) decreased those attitudes significantly immediately after participation, whereas participants with low populist attitudes were unaffected, and the difference in change between the groups was statistically significant. Robustness checks addressed regression to the mean (the tendency of extreme scores to become less extreme at retest), outliers, and ceiling effects (compression of scores at the top of the scale). The study measured attitudes only immediately before and after the event, drew on a small sample that was older, more highly educated, and more politically interested than the general population, and could not identify which experiences during the process drove the differential change.

Adjacent results frame the unresolved issues. A single-case study of a Dutch climate citizens' assembly (Jacobs 2024) found the same short-term pattern — initially more populist participants became less populist — but the decline was not explained by perceived deliberation quality, and subgroups hostile to the policy topic became more populist. Meta-analytic evidence on democratic innovations (Theuwis, Van Ham, and Jacobs 2025) shows broadly positive effects of participatory processes on participants' political attitudes but contains no pooled evidence on populist attitudes, and none on effects beyond the immediate post-event measurement. Latent growth modeling (a longitudinal technique that estimates each respondent's trajectory of change across repeated survey waves) of general population panels in the Netherlands and Great Britain (Theuwis 2025) shows that populist attitudes fluctuate over time and co-move with political dissatisfaction, so the persistence question is empirically live rather than trivial.

Problem Statement

Under what conditions, through which experiences, and for how long does participating in a participatory budget change the populist attitudes of citizens who start out with high populist attitudes? Concretely, beyond the immediate pre/post finding of Theuwis and Kindt (2024) in four Dutch binding participatory budgets: (1) Persistence — does the observed decrease in populist attitudes among initially high-populist participants persist, fade, reverse, or grow over time, and does the trajectory depend on whether participants subsequently see their proposals implemented (policy uptake)? (2) Generalization — does the same heterogeneous pattern (decline among initially high-populist participants, no change among low-populist participants, significant difference between groups) appear in political systems and countries other than the Netherlands, in consultative participatory budgeting designs in which the popular decision is not binding (where the effect could plausibly be weaker or even negative), and in larger and more representative samples of participants? (3) Mechanism — which specific experiences during the process, such as contact with authorities, perceived respect, deliberation with fellow citizens, or perceptions of actual decision-making power, account for the differential decline? These three components jointly serve one scientific objective — establishing whether, for whom, how, and under which institutional designs participation in a participatory budget durably reduces populist attitudes. Each of the three components is an independent sub-question that can be pursued and answered on its own, but all three are required to resolve this objective

References

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