How should a democratic assembly be designed to attract large and diverse groups of citizens? We addressed this question by conducting a population survey in three communities with institutionalized participatory deliberative democracy in Switzerland. To examine participatory disposition in light of both individual characteristics and design features of the assembly that citizens contemplate joining, the survey comprised a conjoint experiment in which each respondent was asked to indicate his or her likelihood of participating in democratic assemblies with varying design features. The main result is that design features emphasizing the communitarian character of the assembly increase citizens’ willingness to participate, especially among disengaged citizens. Moreover, citizens were found to be less attracted by both very consensual and very adversarial meeting styles. Rather, we found meeting styles combining both controversy and consensus to be most favorable to assembly turnout. The implication is that practitioners of participatory or deliberative democracy must engage in community-building to foster turnout and inclusiveness in democratic assemblies.

Following the growing interest in using behavioral theory and choice architecture in the public sector, several new studies have looked at how changes in the choice architecture of budget simulations influence the participants’ budgetary decisions. These studies have also introduced the possible problem that participants may make inappropriate choices in the budget simulation, like creating a budget with unacceptably high budget surpluses. Building on Thaler and Sunstein’s NUDGES framework, we seek to answer the question, ‘How can budgetary choice architects correct for errors such as large ending surpluses at the end of the budget simulation?’ We replicate earlier results on budget starting conditions. Additionally, we test a budget treatment that encourages participants to reduce ending budget surpluses. The budget treatment works as intended and suggests that the large ending budget surpluses stem from errors made by participants in the simulation rather than loss aversion. The need to both nudge and budge participants is important for practicing choice architects, like public budgeters who have to design and implement tools that inform citizens and reveal accurate preferences that conform with legal requirements.

Policy with concentrated costs often faces intense localized opposition. Both private and governmental actors frequently use financial compensation to attempt to overcome this opposition. We measure how effective such compensation is for winning policy support in the arena of housing development. We build a novel survey platform that shows respondents images of their self-reported neighborhood with hypothetical renderings of new housing superimposed on existing structures. Using a sample of nearly 600 Bostonians, we find that compensating residents increases their support for nearby market-rate housing construction. However, compensation does not influence support for affordable housing. We theorize that the inclusion of affordable housing activates symbolic attitudes, decreasing the importance of financial self-interest and thus the effectiveness of compensation. Our findings suggest greater interaction between self-interest and symbolic politics within policy design than previously asserted. Together, this research signals opportunities for coalition building by policy entrepreneurs when facing opposition due to concentrated costs.

South African municipalities are entrusted to perform various functions, including providing basic services to communities. Recently, the auditor-general has raised concern about municipalities’ overall functionality and ability to fulfil their obligations. Municipalities’ service delivery failures have led to disputes between them and their communities. Moreover, South African courts have drawn attention to the impact of service delivery failures and described their catastrophic and devastating effects on communities and their local economies. In addition, it is said that the consequences of these municipal failures are more severe for the communities than any other stakeholder. For this reason, communities require legal options to resolve such disputes. This article puts forward two legal options (and potentially a third) to which communities can turn. The article examines mediation and structural interdicts and argues why these options are suitable methods for resolving disputes between a community and its municipality.

When the analytical lens of intersectionality was first applied to descriptive representation, it documented the increased level of disadvantage for those belonging to more than one underrepresented group. Although ethnic minority women have been slow to benefit from drives to boost ethnic minority or women’s representation, increasingly, political parties seeking to diversify see them as “ticking two boxes,” resulting in a new positive story of relative representational success in many countries and legislatures. However, we argue that the two narratives coexist: intersectional group membership mars the experience of ethnic minority women politicians despite their increased electoral success. Conceptualizing intersectional disadvantage beyond examining differential outcomes, we focus instead on how the mechanisms leading to those outcomes are experienced by ethnic minority women local councillors, from their selection to their working conditions and extra representative burdens. Using 85 interviews with ethnic minority women and men UK local councillors, we demonstrate how gender and racial inequalities leave ethnic minority women fighting two (or more) battles.

This paper presents a unique database that explores how industrialisation affected municipalities' incomes, expenditures and education spending. Using the importance of the mines and steelworks in Biscay in northern Spain between 1860 and 1910 as indicators of industrialisation, the findings show that there was a positive relationship between these dimensions and towns' incomes, which was indirectly transmitted to municipalities' expenditures, showing that municipalities were able to benefit from industrialisation. However, the thriving mining and metallurgy sectors did not support an increase in education spending. The lack of short-term results from spending on education may have led town councils to divert the revenues of industrialisation into more urgent areas, or those that could deliver faster results.

Collaboration between local governments and businesses for poverty reduction has not yet been fully explored in China. Based on an in-depth investigation of two counties during the Targeted Poverty Alleviation campaign, this study proposes a multilayered and relational approach to understanding how different levels of officials collaborate with business to reduce poverty. Elite bureaucrats at the county and township levels prefer a growth-oriented strategy for attracting large-scale enterprises to make investment. Their coalition with businesses has created profits and employment but also hindered authentic participation of small- and medium-sized businesses and villagers in their selected villages. In contrast, in villages that were not prioritized by elite bureaucrats, local officials could utilize their discretion and indigenous resources to exploit development opportunities and support small- and medium-sized businesses to reach poor villagers. This study unpacks China's multilevel system to understand the various forms of government–business collaboration and their implications for rural poverty reduction.

How do cities foster political trust among informal workers? This question is particularly salient in Africa's growing cities where local governments must reconcile policy priorities across highly heterogeneous constituencies, including a burgeoning middle-class and a large informal economy. We argue that expectations about reciprocity and procedural justice shape the probability that informal traders trust their local government. In doing so, we analyse a survey of approximately 1000 informal traders in Ghana's three main cities – Accra, Kumasi and Tamale. We find that traders who paid requisite fees to local assemblies and could attribute a benefit from those payments were more likely to trust their local government while those who had experienced harassment by city authorities were less likely to do so. The paper highlights that drivers of trust among diverse urban constituencies deserve greater empirical and comparative attention, especially as countries deepen decentralisation initiatives and cities commit to development goals around inclusivity.