Proportionally Representative Participatory Budgeting: Axioms and Algorithms

Haris Aziz (UNSW Sydney and Data61), Barton E. Lee (UNSW Sydney and Data61), Nimrod Talmon (Ben-Gurion University)

Abstract

Participatory budgeting is one of the exciting developments in deliberative grassroots democracy. We concentrate on approval elections and propose proportional representation axioms in participatory budgeting, by generalizing relevant axioms for approvalbased multi-winner elections. We observe a rich landscape with respect to the computational complexity of identifying proportional budgets and computing such, and present budgeting methods that satisfy these axioms by identifying budgets that are representative to the demands of vast segments of the voters.