Professor Kurt Thurmaier
Professor Kurt Thurmaier, Distinguished Engagement Professor in the NIU Department of Public Administration, is teaching a new CLA course on April 3, 2025 – Participatory Budgeting: Engaging the Public in Public Decision Making.
We caught up with him to learn more about participatory budgeting and the course. Here’s our conversation.
To start out, what is participatory budgeting?
Participatory budgeting a way for citizens to be involved in public budgeting because it’s their tax money! The idea is, how can a local government engage citizens to better understand their preferences and values?
It can take lots of different forms. For example, in DeKalb we have the Citizens Advisory Finance Committee, which is made-up of five or six people who understand finance, mostly from the private sector. That committee is there to provide another perspective on budget choices, fiscal problems, financial management and so on.
Another form is common in larger cities. Often, the budget will allocate a certain number of dollars to each ward. Then the council member works with the citizens in that neighborhood to determine resident priorities for sidewalks, parks, patching potholes, whatever is needed. That model is active in quite a few wards in Chicago, New York, Kansas City, and other places around the country.
Then there are cities that hold regular meetings at the beginning of the budget process to ask residents: what are your concerns? What are your priorities? And then they use that information to help set up the budget.
A citizen survey is another common option. For example, Ames, Iowa, has a biennial survey, and there’s a set of questions asking things like, what’s the worst intersection in town? Where is the worst traffic congestion in town? Those results are fed into the capital improvement plan and the budgeting process, and you can actually see where certain projects were moved up in priority because of citizen rankings.
Then there’s another level: a budgeting simulator called the Balancing Act, which is used in cities such as Dubuque, Iowa, for example. It’s a local government budget simulation, where cities put their budget online and residents have the chance to work through the budget just like the city manager, staff and elected officials have to do. If they want to increase budget in a certain category, they either need to increase tax revenue or decrease expenses in a different category. That simulation brings citizen engagement up to another level.
What are some of the benefits of participatory budgeting?
The most direct and immediate benefit, according to research, is increased trust in government. If citizens have background information and understand the difficult choices the local government is having to make, they’re more likely to understand and accept things such as tax increases.
Having transparency and community input is important because it can be hard to understand – based on the National Engineering Road Rating System, for example – why certain road projects are needed. But if you invite people to give feedback, to be involved in a session talking about the capital budget and road needs with the city engineer, then they’re more likely to say, Yes – I’m willing to raise sales tax a cent if that money is dedicated to making our roads better.
Can you share a little bit about your background? How did you get interested in local government, in general, and participatory budgeting, in particular?
That’s a long story, but the short version is, I came from a pretty active, engaged family, and in high school, for example, I was working on getting bike lanes in our town. I got put on a county committee to plan bike routes, and that was my first taste of working with the local government process.
My undergrad was an economics and political science double major, so I understand economic as well as political perspectives, and budgeting is both. Politics is about value choices, and budgeting is about value choices. Economics is about allocating funds across all those value choices.
My master’s is in public administration, and then my first professional job was in the Wisconsin State Budget Office, where I was the budget analysts for about four years advising the governor on local government and economic development budgets.
When I went for my Ph.D., I focused on budgeting and financial management and development administration, which is basically economic development in low-income countries.
The key question that drives my research is: on what basis do people make budget choices? How much is the fiscal/economic side, and how much is the political side?
In the end, how much you spend on X and how much you spend on Y resolves to value choices. There’s no economic formula for that. And the question becomes, how do you get to those value choices?
Is there anything people should know about the format of the class, or what to expect from it?
We’ll be engaged in doing the budget simulation exercise I mentioned before, so civic leaders will get a hands-on experience of participatory government and an idea of how they might use the simulator in their own local context. We’ll also talk through the different models of participatory budgeting to give people a sense of the possibilities in their own jurisdiction for how they could engage more with residents.
I’ve written a teaching case using the simulation for cut-back budgeting. I’ve been doing that for about five years, and it just got published in the Journal of Public Affairs Education, so I’m pleased with that and excited to share it with city managers and other civic leaders.
Is there anything else you’d like to share that I didn’t ask about?
I’m a fan of democracy and budgeting going together! I think a lot of city managers worry about citizen engagement because for many of them, citizen engagement is the same people showing up at the microphone to complain about taxes. It’s easy to develop a defensive perspective.
But if you can get past the negativism of a few regulars and talk to more people, both through citizen surveys and engaging people in broader conversations, then you get a better idea of when residents actually support taxes or specific budget choices. So I’m in favor of people getting past the few loudest voices and getting a broader understanding of what citizens actually think.
To learn more about participatory budgeting, sign up for Professor Thurmaier’s course on April 3, 2025.
