Does Technologically Enabled Citizen Participation Lead to Budget Adjustments? An Investigation of Boston, MA, and San Francisco, CA

Citizen participation in government can provide a broad range of benefits to governments and citizens alike. Advances in information technologies have enabled new types of citizen participation with governments. However, we currently lack an understanding of how these new types of participation, particularly those that generate information on community needs, influence resource allocations. This article focuses on one of these new technologies, 311 systems, and how citizen requests might influence departmental budget allocations. We track budget allocation in the cities of Boston and San Francisco for 106 departments or subunits from FY2005 to FY2013. Our findings indicate that there is no significant resource benefit for departments using 311 versus those that do not. While departments using 311 do have larger budget allocations than those that do not, those departments had larger budget allocations prior to the implementation of 311. And while data generated in the 311-enabled citizen participation are increasingly used to measure departmental performance, the findings of this study show that this information has little to no effect on the allocated share of the budget for departments.