The Voting Processes in Digital Participative Budget: A Case Study

The Participative Budget consists of a process in which citizens can directly participate in decision-making and regulation of public budget spending. The experience of the City of Belo Horizonte (Brazil) with the Participative Budget is a consolidated e-democratic process in the government and, most importantly, for the population. By exploring techniques provided by Information and Communication Technology, the Digital Participative Budget was introduced. Hence, a new question is posed: which methodology should be used for the computerization of this process and what would be the best suited interaction and communication resources for the e-democratic process? Such decisions will be discussed in this paper. This paper presents the experience of Belo Horizonte with the implementation of the Digital Participative Budget, from the very conception and implementation of the project up to the voting period as well as its current phase. Accordingly, this paper broaches the discussion of the conditions that led to the development of this project, the model adopted for the computerization of the process, the functionalities of the web system, and the data from the case studies developed in Belo Horizonte.