Research Summary: Fair Feed Ranking for Participatory Budgeting

Research identifies that the ranking of proposals within large-scale participatory budgeting (PB) platforms significantly influences citizen engagement and acts as a form of agenda-setting. Current systems, such as Consul Democracy, frequently prioritize proposals based on popularity, recency, or comment activity, potentially leading to inequitable exposure for other submissions. A new design, FairFeed, is proposed to address this by incorporating transparent preferences, boosting underexposed proposals, and allowing for crowd-sourced vetting, aiming to enhance fairness in democratic digital platforms.

Why it matters

The way information is presented in digital civic engagement platforms directly impacts democratic outcomes by shaping citizen awareness and participation. Ensuring equitable visibility for all proposals is critical for fostering inclusive decision-making processes and preventing algorithmic bias from concentrating attention on a select few.

Key insights

• Proposal ranking in large-scale participatory budgeting (PB) systems exerts significant agenda-setting power, influencing citizen inspection of proposals.
• Fair exposure of proposals should be a primary democratic-design goal for PB platforms.
• Widely used digital-democracy platforms, such as Consul Democracy, typically order proposal feeds by popularity, recency, or comment activity.
• The proposed FairFeed design aims for fair exposure by using transparently declared preferences and boosting under-exposed proposals.
• FairFeed includes a rate-limited reject channel for crowd-sourced vetting of proposals.
• The FairFeed design was evaluated in a simulation anchored in Munich's 2025 PB process.

Source

arXiv — Computers and Society — https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29819