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ABSTRACT
Participatory budgeting (PB) has been introduced to China at the grass-root level to strengthen the influence of the public in the budgetary decision-making process. Based on a theoretical framework from the perspective of budgetary decision-making, this paper investi-gates the driving forces for the implementation of PB in Wuxi City, the procedures of citizen participation, the outcomes of participation, and the future challenges in implementing the reform. Field research was conducted to collect data for this case study, which finds that Wuxi has made some progress in enhancing social, political, economic and technical rationalities but not in legal rationality. This paper also discusses the policy implications of this case study for further development of PB in China.
1. INTRODUCTION
In recent decades, China's economic growth brought by modernization and marketization has generally enhanced the income and material living standards of Chinese people. However, the transformation of the political and adminis-trative systems is lagging behind the soaring economic development. Mean-while, the growing citizenship awareness is appealing for an introspection of the relationship between the state and the society. An increasing number of conflicts between the state and the society reveal a rising social dissatisfaction towards the authority. This dissatisfaction reduces the capacity of governments to make and implement public policy (Pierre and Peters, 2000; Scott, 2007). Budgetary decision-making plays a decisive role in public policy. Budgeting is politics (Wildavsky, 1964), because it is about distributing scarce resources and making choices on alternative plans for government operation. Obviously, public budgeting is closely related to public interests and social welfare as well as the state-society relationship. Hence, budgeting plays a significant role in mitigating social dissatisfaction and consolidating state legitimacy. Howev- er, few existing studies discussed these issues from the perspective of public budgeting.
Given that market-oriented economic reforms have fundamentally changed China's economic structure and the relationship between the state and citizens as taxpayers, strengthening the rationality and democracy of public budgeting has been one of the major tasks in China's fiscal reform (Ma, 2005). In view of this demand, citizen participation in public budgeting processes, often la-beled participatory budgeting (PB), has been introduced to some local gov-ernments in China as a new method to improve the financial accountability of the government (Ma, 2009) and...