Quali fattori spiegano l'istituzionalizzazione? Una Qualitative Comparative Analysis dei bilanci partecipativi nelle grandi città italiane

Since its introduction in Porto Alegre (Brazil) in 1989, Participatory Budgeting (PB) has probably become the most widespread participatory policy in the world. As of today, there are several research projects which monitor the implementation of this tool all over the world, or in specific areas of this. Furthermore, thousands of studies investigated the tool, its effects, its pros and cons. These research projects and studies show that, more often than not, PB is implemented one-shot, that is on an ad hoc basis. It usually fails to become an ordinary government tool or, as some authors put it, to become “institutionalized”. Still, sometimes it also succeeds in doing so. Given that PB has, since 1989, been implemented thousands of times all over the world; and that there are thousand of publications dealing with it; some recent works started building the first explanatory models which aim to understand why PB manages to get institutionalized in some contexts, and not in others. These works particularly relied on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to try to answer this research question. This dissertation connects itself with the latter research strand, and specifically aims to answer the following research question: which factors can explain the (non)institutionalization of PB in Italian big cities, as of 2023? This focus on Italy comes from the circumstance that Italy has been one of the first countries PB set foot in after “leaving” Brazil; and from the circumstance that, according to monitoring projects, Italy is one of the European countries where PB is implemented the most. The focus on big cities comes instead from the circumstance that, according to some scholars, bigger cities might not represent the best context to implement participatory policies; idea which is rejected by other scholars. Consequently, there is a theoretical interest in exploring the reason behind (non)institutionalization of PB in big cities, in particular. The dissertation uses QCA to answer the proposed research question. First officially proposed by professor Charles Ragin in 1987, QCA is “a comparative case-study method that calculates cross-case regularities (co-occurrences of causes and outcomes) using Boolean algebra” (Rutten 2020, 135). In particular, QCA looks for relations of necessity and sufficiency between explanatory factors and the outcome, and then pushes researchers to “go back” to cases, to understand, starting from the results of the analyses of necessity of sufficiency, what led to the (non)outcome in the analyzed cases. The dissertation proceeds as follows. Chapter 1 deals with the Brazilian origins of Participatory Budgeting and the two main theories which are key to understanding this policy, that of participatory democracy and that of deliberative democracy. In particular, it will deal with the Brazilian roots of Participatory Budgeting and its subsequent arrival in Italy, the origins of the cited theories, the differences and intersections between them, the pros and cons of the policies inspired by these theories. Chapter 2 deals instead with the concept of "institutionalization" of participatory practices, traces the level of institutionalization in Italy of other participatory tools, explains how the cities under study were selected and outlines the factors to be observed in each city to evaluate whether Participatory Budgeting is institutionalized or not. Chapter 3 presents the results of the research concerning the institutionalization of the policy in the cities under investigation. That is, it shows in which of these cities Participatory Budgeting can be considered institutionalized. Chapter 4 focuses instead on QCA, on the reasons that led Ragin to create it, on its theoretical foundations and, obviously, on how it works, on the operations that must be conducted to implement one correctly, and on its strengths and weaknesses. Chapter 5 introduces what, according to the relevant literature, are some factors capable of explaining the institutionalization of participatory tools in general, exposes the explanatory factors that have been chosen for the implementation of QCA, and also explains why they were chosen. Chapter 6 outlines instead how these explanatory conditions were measured and calibrated. Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 present the results of the analyses of necessity and sufficiency, respectively. Chapter 9 presents the results of some tests conducted to evaluate the robustness of the results obtained in the previous chapters and, through case studies for each city, presents the possible explanations behind the presence or absence of the outcome “Participatory Budgeting institutionalized as of 2023”. Finally, the conclusions will discuss the importance of the results achieved by this research, the strengths and limitations of this study, and possible lines for future research.