The Presence of Participatory Budgets in Municipalities with Fewer Than 20,000 Inhabitants: A Descriptive Study Based on the Content Analysis of Official Municipal Portals

Once our previous studies have confirmed the widespread use of participatory budgets in medium-large and large municipalities, we consider the level of implementation in medium and small municipalities. The hypothesis of an extension of this participatory tool inversely proportional to the size of the municipality is in line with the vast majority of specialized literature, but we wanted to check here to what extent the presence in small municipalities could be testimonial. In this sense, we use the concept of “urbanormativity” proposed by Fulkerson & Thomas (2019) to mean that on many occasions (and participatory policies are no exception) operating criteria specific to the city are applied to rural environments. Based on a content analysis of the websites of all municipalities with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants in the Valencian Community (Spain), it can be seen that, in fact, in the smallest municipalities (less than 1,000 inhabitants) the presence of participatory budgets is testimonial, and when they are implemented, they do so as a one-off experience without continuity. We completed the research with semi-structured interviews with political and administrative representatives of these localities to find out the attitudes and motivations that intervene in these experiences. The argument of urbanormativity is repeated in these discourses, since it points to an insufficient critical mass in the towns to develop these processes, and, therefore, they return to “traditional” mechanisms based on the direct contact that the scale of these municipalities allows.