doxa.comunicación | nº 28, pp. 17-36 | 29

January-June of 2019

Juan Luis Manfredi Sánchez and Luis Mauricio Calvo Rubio

ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978

3.2. Data regarding participation

In the three years of existence of the Madrid City Council’s participative budgets, 203,698 Madrid citizens have participated in this initiative, demonstrating a constant increase in participation year after year. While in 2016, 45,533 people from Madrid took part in the process, in 2017 the number rose to 67,133. In 2018, the number reached 91,032. This means that interest in the process has grown by 100% in three years.

In 2016, a total of 5,184 proposals were received, of which 1,658 were considered unfeasible by municipal specialists. Non-viability is usually related to four possible factors: the lack of administrative authority, an insufficient budget, the negative externality that it generates, or a shortage of specific development of the proposal. In the final phase, there were 623 proposals, of which 206 were selected.

The following year, 3,215 proposals were submitted, of which 925 were classified as non-viable. The 311 that finally obtained an economic endowment were selected from among the 720 that managed to reach the final stage.

In 2018, 100 million Euros were distributed among 328 projects that received the most votes in the last phase in which 702 proposals participated. In total, 3,323 ideas were submitted, although 1,027 were rejected by the specialists.

Comparing the participation data to the census of Madrid’s residents over 16 years of age as of January 1st in each of the years, we can see that participation has gone from 1.68% to 3.30% in the years from 2016 to 2018 (Table 2).

Table 2. Evolution of the participation in relation to the census of Madrid’s citizens over 16 years of age.

Source: www.decide.madrid.es and the Municipal Register Prepared by the authors.

The data collected also provides us with knowledge regarding participation according to gender. However, it should be noted that not all profiles include this information, although this is the case among the vast majority: of the 203,698 participants in the cumulative total of the three years, information based on gender is available for a total of 203,373; in other words, 99.84%. These figures provide evidence of equal participation in the first two years, which was interrupted in favour of women in the last year with a difference of more than 4 percentage points (Table 3).