No and Hsueh (2020) showed that Seoul's institutionalized participatory budgeting (PB), whose formal rules do not state redistribution as a goal, nonetheless allocated public funds toward poor neighborhoods, and that this redistributive pattern was associated with the inclusiveness of the process's structural design, with the observed relationship appearing nonlinear. The study's unresolved issues remain open: whether the inclusiveness-allocation relationship has a threshold and where it lies, how inclusiveness can additionally be measured beyond the ordinance-based committee-type classification (e.g., committee attendance rates and meeting counts), whether redistribution extends to dimensions other than fund allocation, for example programs or projects specifically targeting low-income populations, and how the various types of PB committees work in diverse social, economic, and environmental contexts. No prior study estimates the functional form of the inclusiveness-redistribution link, uses attendance-based measures for allocation outcomes, or systematically maps its contextual moderators; adjacent results on PB adoption and spending categories (Jung and Kim 2024; Shin, Cho and Oh 2025) leave the design-specific, neighborhood-level core open.

Background

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a local-budgeting practice in which residents, rather than only officials and elected councils, discuss, deliberate on, and help decide how part of a public budget is spent. It originated in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989 and has since spread worldwide, and a long empirical literature asks whether it actually redirects resources toward poorer residents. In Brazil, municipalities that adopted PB shifted spending toward health and sanitation and experienced lower infant mortality (Goncalves 2014; Touchton and Wampler 2014). In the United States, public participation in state-agency budgeting is associated with better organizational performance (Neshkova and Guo 2012), and in New York City council-district PB, capital funding rose in next-to-lowest-income census tracts after adoption, though not in the very poorest ones (Shybalkina and Bifulco 2019). In South Korea, where PB was made mandatory for local governments in the early 2010s, citizen participation in budgeting has been linked to public funds flowing toward lower-income districts (Hong and Cho 2018).

Seoul, the setting of the source study, is an instructive case because PB there is institutionalized rather than activist: each of the city's 25 autonomous districts (gu) runs a mandated PB process in which a participatory budgeting committee reviews and shapes the district budget, with committee composition varying across districts between a majority of ordinary residents and a larger share of government-appointed experts, and redistribution is not an explicit goal of the process. Against this backdrop, No and Hsueh (2020) examined the relationship between the inclusiveness of the structural design of the participatory process and resource-allocation outcomes. Inclusiveness of structural design is theorized through participation and representativeness (offering diverse structural opportunities can improve inclusion by increasing both) and is operationalized by the committee structures each district's PB ordinance requires: type A (no committee required, or only a general committee), type B (general committee plus at least one regional or thematic subcommittee), and type C (general committee plus both thematic and regional subcommittees), entering the authors' multilevel models as type-B and type-C indicators with type A as the base category. The outcomes are project-level fund amounts (2,218 proposals that reached the final vote in the 2012-2015 PB cycles, i.e. fiscal years 2013-2016, nested in the 25 districts), with district mean monthly household income from Seoul's 2008 survey as the income measure, so that 'poor neighborhoods' in the study's title denotes the city's poorer districts. The authors found that organizational structures enabling and encouraging public participation led Seoul's PB to distribute public funds toward poor neighborhoods, and that the relationship is not simply linear: type-C districts were not statistically distinguishable from type-A districts.

The study closed with unresolved issues that define the present problem, enumerated in its conclusion as several possibilities for future research. First, the relationship between inclusiveness and fund allocation is not simply linear: the type-C null implies there may be a threshold beyond which adding organizational structures no longer leads to higher fund allocations, but the study located no threshold and called for probing this result with additional measures of inclusiveness, such as committee members' attendance rates or the number of committee meetings, rather than relying solely on the ordinance-based committee-type classification. Second, the analysis concerned the allocation of funds, and other dimensions of redistribution could be examined by means of alternative measures, for example determining whether people choose more of a certain type of program or project that specifically targets the low-income population through PB; related evidence from Seoul's own PB shows committee-member expertise, rather than member numbers or attendance, predicted how much citizen-proposed budget survived into district budgets (Choi 2014), but that work studied adoption amounts, not who received them. Third, it remains to be examined how the various types of PB committees work differently in diverse social, economic, and environmental contexts.

Problem Statement

In Seoul's institutionalized participatory budgeting, districts whose PB ordinances require more organizational structures for participation obtained more funds, and funds flowed disproportionately toward districts with lower mean household income, while the relationship between inclusiveness of the PB structural design and fund allocation is not simply linear: type-C districts (general committee plus both thematic and regional subcommittees) were not statistically distinguishable from type-A districts (no subcommittee, or only a general committee), which the authors read as implying that there may be a threshold beyond which adding organizational structures no longer raises allocations. The unresolved problem, as left by the source study's closing discussion and not addressed by subsequent literature, consists of three separately enumerated future-research directions: (1) probe that non-linear result, i.e. determine the form of the relationship between inclusiveness of participatory structural design and redistributive fund allocation toward poorer districts, including whether a threshold exists and, if one is identified, where it lies; (2) examine dimensions of redistribution other than fund allocations; and (3) examine how the various types of PB committees work differently in diverse social, economic, and environmental contexts.

These are three distinct open directions in the source, not a single conjunctive question requiring one answer to resolve all three jointly; a complete solution addresses each direction as its own sub-question, and resolving one does not resolve the others. Direction (1) concerns the Seoul inclusiveness-allocation relationship the source estimated (25 autonomous districts; 2,218 project proposals that reached the final vote in the 2012-2015 PB cycles, i.e. fiscal years 2013-2016, with projects nested in districts), so a study of an unrelated setting does not by itself answer it; cross-context comparison is the object of direction (3).

References

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