Brooklyn Broadside: ‘Participatory Democracy’ Gets Test
Almost all the governments in our country — federal, state, city, county and local — are democratic republics. People in a geographical area democratically elect other people to represent them in the business of government.
This approach is cumbersome, but as Winston Churchill once famously said, “It’s better than the alternatives.”
Now an experiment is underway in a few City Council districts, two in Brooklyn, called the Participating Budgeting Project, which is the name of a nonprofit organization. Here is how it works: those who want to participate join together to make real budget decisions a part of a City Councilperson’s discretionary budget — in this case $1 million. This is participatory democracy such as still practiced in a few small towns in New England.