Building Democracy, One City Budget at a Time

It’s not just Zohran Mamdani in New York. Brandon Johnson in Chicago, Michelle Wu in Boston, Freddie O’Connell in Nashville, Katie Wilson in Seattle and other local progressive politicians are promising to address the affordability crisis in part by expanding public services like transit and child care.

But elected officials often lack the political capital and power to push back against real estate and fossil fuel lobbies, Trump administration cutbacks and billionaire-driven pushbacks against attempts at progressive taxation.

How can constituents support officials — and hold them accountable — after an election? Case studies from around the world show that to get the resources they need to address their needs, cities must democratize democracy. While researching my book “Budget Justice,” I found that while politicians routinely state that they have “no choice” but to cut public services, it is often nearly impossible for everyday citizens to check such claims, or to substantively help inform policy priorities.

City budgets are not neutral, technical documents. Rather, they are moral documents that reflect specific values and theories of how governments should work. One can hardly imagine a mayor making policy decisions without at least quietly checking with big donors, real estate developers and labor unions. And what about everyday residents? To truly create a city we can afford, we need public budgets that give historically marginalized communities resources and power to address their needs.

Indeed, large protests like “No Kings” show that many Americans are ready to be activated and politically engaged. This is not a moment to be squandered. Cities need new entry points and spaces for everyday residents to engage in policymaking and organize themselves, to balance out the influence of already organized groups and moneyed interests. 

Participatory democratic experiments like civic assemblies or participatory budgeting (or PB), in which constituents allocate public funds, can act as schools of democracy between elections and protests.

These sorts of experiments are not just cute exercises. In Brazil, where PB first began in 1989, cities that implemented the process collected 30% more in taxes, developed more civil society organizations than those without PB, boasted of impressive results, like lowering infant mortality, and helped residents develop the political will to reject development projects — like luxury hotels — that they felt reflected business interests more than public needs.

I focus on PB here not because it’s a silver bullet, but because it’s an idea that has gained traction around the country, and could thus serve as a convenient starting point. New York already has a PB process called PBNYC, with some notable achievements. (I served on PB advisory committees in the city when it first began in 2011 until 2021.) New Yorkers have allocated over $300 million in public funds through PB, sometimes surprising officials with their articulated priorities, focus on equity and innovative ideas along the way. And PB participants were 8.4% more likely to vote than those who had not participated in the process; the effects are even greater for those who have lower probabilities of voting, such as low-income and Black voters. In other words, as Mamdani did, PB can dramatically change the electorate.

But there are substantive critiques of New York’s existing PB process, which suffers from extremely limited outreach and scope. PB ends up being a channel through which New Yorkers pitifully try to make up for budget cuts, not actually share power. As blogger Ben Kabak posted on X, “This isn’t … ‘fun.’ … [O]ne of the richest cities in the world is nickel-and-diming itself out of a bunch of cheap infrastructure upgrades it should be doing as a matter of course.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Even in the current, limited processes, there are exceptional project proposals that do inspire — often marked by phrases like “pilot” or “down payment.” Residents developed these in order to demonstrate that they could be done — and with PB votes, that they had public support. For example, a subway station elevator ballot item clearly stated that paltry PB funds alone could not possibly pay for such an elevator; the project rather intended to “put pressure” on the public transit authority to provide the remainder of funds needed to create the first accessible station in the council district. It succeeded.

For PB to make a dent in New York City’s $116 billion budget, it would need to increase dramatically. (The Paris PB process allocates roughly 50 euros per capita; if New York did something similar, our PB process would involve roughly $500 million per year, not $40 million.)

But even at more modest scales, experiments like PB can still make a greater impact if they explicitly connect with organizing and policy efforts outside of PB, especially for the provision of public goods. Indeed, PB has special potential for impact if it emphasizes assemblies and combines with solidarity economy initiatives in synergistic ways. In Brooklyn, a Care Forward group won PB funds to facilitate dialogues between local employers and domestic workers such as nannies and housecleaners, and to set new community standards for local domestic work. What if relevant city agencies and councils took on this project as inspiration, and then engaged more residents in conversations to deliberate similar standards for the whole city? What if these groups then organized larger campaigns around the demands they so painstakingly developed, to simultaneously support and push their progressive mayors to stick with their ambitious goals?

Cities should move beyond small PB processes, and implement their most impactful element — not voting for projects, but public assemblies — as more than a side exercise. Imagine the public finances and politics bootcamp built into PB assemblies. In Boston, the Better Budget Alliance is convening an assembly to decide on priorities for the coming year’s city budget. In Nashville, efforts by the Black Nashville Assembly and Youth Assembly of the Southern Movement Committee were crucial in developing the city’s anti-carceral, “evidence-based, people-informed” Office of Youth Safety.

What if these were just the beginning, not an endpoint, of political participation? Democratizing the city budget builds on what Mamdani has called a collaborative “politics of the future” — demonstrating how New Yorkers might achieve budget justice by working together for the changes they prioritize, not competing against one another for crumbs of the proverbial pie.

By weaving in public assemblies and other participatory democratic opportunities as civic infrastructures, everyday New Yorkers can mobilize, organize, have Mamdani’s back between elections and help to realize a city we can afford and thrive in.