English

Privacy-Aware Predictions in Participatory Budgeting

Computers and Society 2026-02-04 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Participatory budgeting is a democratic innovation that empowers citizens to propose and vote on public investment projects. While researchers in computer science focused on improving the voting phase of this process, in this work we aim to support organizers of participatory budgeting campaigns to manage large volumes of project proposals at the submission stage. We propose a privacy-preserving approach to predict which proposals are likely to be funded, using only projects' textual descriptions and anonymous historical voting records, without relying on voter demographics or personally identifiable information.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.06577,
  title  = {Privacy-Aware Predictions in Participatory Budgeting},
  author = {Juan Zambrano and Clément Contet and Jairo Gudiño-Rosero and Felipe Garrido-Lucero and Umberto Grandi and César Hidalgo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.06577},
  year   = {2026}
}