Collective Intelligence for Democracy: Empowering Minorities and Everyone in Participatory Budgeting

17 Pages Posted: 18 May 2024

See all articles by Dino Carpentras

Dino Carpentras

ETH Zurich

Regula Hänggli

University of Fribourg

Dirk Helbing

ETH Zürich - Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences (GESS)

Date Written: May 18, 2024

Abstract

Currently, there are increasing attempts to better involve citizens in the political decision processes. A successful approach in that regard has been participatory budgeting (PB), which allows citizens to propose projects and then to decide how to distribute a given budget over them. In the meanwhile, literature on collective intelligence (CI) has shown that groups of people can solve complex problems and even outperform experts. Thus by combining CI and PB it should be possible for citizens to identify problems and create their own solutions. In this article, we first explore how a system combining CI and PB produces solutions that strongly penalize minorities, as solution’s quality depends on group’s size. Then, we introduce an approach that can overcome the issue. Indeed, by using a common knowledge base for the storage of partial solutions, the quality of solutions of minorities can benefit from the work of the majority, thereby promoting fairness. Interestingly, this approach also benefits majorities, as the quality of their solutions is further improved by the work of the minorities, thus, reaching better solutions for everyone. This stresses the potential and importance of an open innovation approach, which is committed to information sharing.

Keywords: participatory budgeting, collective intelligence, agent-based modelling

Suggested Citation

Carpentras, Dino and Hänggli, Regula and Helbing, Dirk, Collective Intelligence for Democracy: Empowering Minorities and Everyone in Participatory Budgeting (May 18, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4832498 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4832498

Regula Hänggli

University of Fribourg ( email )

Avenue de l'Europe 20
CH-1700 Fribourg
Switzerland

Dirk Helbing

ETH Zürich - Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences (GESS) ( email )

ETH Zurich - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
Clausiusstrasse 50
Zurich, 8092
Switzerland

HOME PAGE: http://www.coss.ethz.ch

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