SCIENCE ARTICLE
Quantitative and qualitative aspects of participatory budgeting – the Kielce case study
 
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1
Faculty of Management and Computer Modelling, Kielce University of Technology, Poland
 
2
Faculty of Management and Computer Modelling, Kielce University of Technology, Poland
 
These authors had equal contribution to this work
 
 
Submission date: 2024-10-30
 
 
Final revision date: 2025-03-05
 
 
Acceptance date: 2025-07-07
 
 
Publication date: 2025-08-13
 
 
Corresponding author
Marcin Zdradzisz   

Faculty of Management and Computer Modelling, Kielce University of Technology, al. Tysiąclecia Państwa Polskiego 7, 25-314, Kielce, Poland
 
 
Management 2025;(1):856-879
 
KEYWORDS
JEL CLASSIFICATION CODES
H72
 
TOPICS
ABSTRACT
Research background and purpose: Participatory budgeting (PB) plays an important role in a city live. It strengthens democracy, improves transparency of public expenditures, helps allocate resources more efficiently, and increases civic responsibility. In order to assess how such a mechanism contributes to public involvement and which initiatives are prioritized by the community engaged in the participatory budgeting process, a pilot study was undertaken for a selected Polish voivodeship city - Kielce. Attention was paid to the category of winning tasks, considering the classification by project type and its narrative. Design/methodology/approach: The exploratory analysis was carried out on real unit data. Data on projects submitted by residents were collected from websites using web scraping tools. The article relies on the case-study method as well as on the methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis. The narrative data were explored with the assistance of machine learning technology – Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the results were illustrated in the form of a Word Cloud. Findings: The conclusions of the picture of participatory budgeting in the chosen city are decidedly positive. It is a tool that promotes democratization of decision-making processes and involvement of citizens in public life. It is significant that the local community opts for soft projects, particularly green ones. Value added and limitations: This study investigates the changes in citizen engagement in PB using a time- and project-type-oriented quantitative approach. Furthermore, a machine learning-based qualitative approach in terms of NLP was employed to capture the major PB issues and topics, which is rather absent in this research field. As a pilot study, this research is limited to a single city and begins to explore text processing algorithms in such analysis. The promising results suggest potential for research development in the future.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research was supported by: Kielce University of Technology, Faculty of Management and Computer Modelling, Kielce, Poland, grant number 04.0.06.00/1.02.001 SUBB.ZKIS.25.001.
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