What Can Interactive Visualization do for Participatory Budgeting in Chicago?

TL;DR

This paper explores how interactive visualization can enhance participatory budgeting in Chicago by improving transparency, voter engagement, and preference articulation, while also addressing access barriers and mistrust.

Contribution

It introduces a design probe-based approach to incorporate visualization into PB tools, highlighting opportunities and challenges for civic engagement.

Findings

Visualization helps set budget expectations.

Visualization enables broader preference expression.

Addressing access barriers is crucial for transparency.

Abstract

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic approach to allocating municipal spending that has been adopted in many places in recent years, including in Chicago. Current PB voting resembles a ballot where residents are asked which municipal projects, such as school improvements and road repairs, to fund with a limited budget. In this work, we ask how interactive visualization can benefit PB by conducting a design probe-based interview study (N=13) with policy workers and academics with expertise in PB, urban planning, and civic HCI. Our probe explores how graphical elicitation of voter preferences and a dashboard of voting statistics can be incorporated into a realistic PB tool. Through qualitative analysis, we find that visualization creates opportunities for city government to set expectations about budget constraints while also granting their constituents greater freedom to articulate a wider range of preferences. However, using visualization to provide transparency about PB requires efforts to mitigate potential access barriers and mistrust. We call for more visualization professionals to help build civic capacity by working in and studying political systems.