A Condorcet-Consistent Democratic Budgeting Algorithm
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The budget is the key means for effecting policy in democracies, yet its preparation is typically an excluding, opaque process. We aim to rectify this by providing for the democratic creation of complete budgets, e.g., budgets of cooperatives, cities, or states. These budgets are typically (i) prepared, discussed, and voted upon by comparing with the present budget; (ii) quantitative, in that most items typically appear in quantities larger than 1 and with varying costs; and (iii) hierarchical, reflecting the hierarchical structure of the budgeted organization. These characteristics are not addressed by extant work on participatory budgeting, which usually produce budgets of new discrete projects not related to the present budget and are neither quantitative nor hierarchical. We apply the Condorcet principle to a general democratic budgeting scenario. While in the general case a vote may be any partial order on the items at stake, including quantitative ones, eliciting such a vote may be complex; to ease elicitation, votes may be provided as a simple amendment to the present budget, e.g., by adding or removing items or by changing their quantities. We devise a polynomial-time budgeting algorithm that, given such a scenario, produces the Condorcet winner if it exists and resolves Condorcet cycles by utilizing the distance from the present budget, in line with Reality-aware Social Choice theory. Our method can be applied hierarchically to democratically produce budgets of hierarchical organizations such as cities and states. While our democratic budgeting algorithm could be applied by the constituency at large, it could be just as useful to democratizing the budgeting process of budget committees and parliaments, supplanting the usual last-minute take-it-or-leave-it budget voting sessions by a process based on open discussion followed by a truly budget-shaping democratic vote.
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