The study is devoted to the presentation of the functioning of the civic budget in Elbląg from the normative and practical perspective. The authors focus on selected legal and political science issues, i.e. the initiative to submit proposals of tasks to be financed from the civic budget, the territorial and subjective scope of submitted projects and selected aspects of how this form of public consultations works in practice. The results of the research lead to the conclusion that, despite the fact that eight editions of the civic budget have already been carried out, the city has not developed an ideal model of its functioning. The biggest problems seem to be manifested in the legislative inconsistency and the weakening interest of residents.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the behavior of local authorities on the issue of participatory budget in the situation of confronting the COVID-19 pandemic. A new category has been introduced here - direct contact-free democracy, which aims to emphasize the need to avoid personal contact while continuing the performance of mechanisms accompanying democracy. To verify the accepted hypothesis, an existing sources analysis, and a survey, in which more than 40 cities with district rights participated, were conducted.

Model of participatory budget in Poland: an attempt to organize theoretical issues

The term of a ‘model/models’ of the civic (participatory) budget (CB) has not been discussed more widely in the Polish literature so far. There are also no publications comparing the existing typologies or classifications. In the article, the author presents what the civic budget model is and its definition in political science research. Various approaches are presented based on both Polish and English-language literature on the subject. The main aim of the article is to propose a model of civic budget in Poland. For this purpose, the author presents practical solutions of the Polish CB and, on this basis, distinguishes between general models (based on the scale of the entire state) and specific models (based on the solutions in local government units). The author also presents the components of these general and specific models.

The last decades have been a time of dynamic changes in the scope of public management tools, as well as a gradual increase in the participation of citizens at every stage of public decision-making. That is why application of ICT tools in practice of public policy implementation is currently a popular direction of public administration development. The aim of the article is to analyse how this postulate is implemented on the example of Polish participatory budgets. On the basis of quantitative research the authors have analysed participatory budgets that function in towns with powiat rights. In the conclusions it is stated that ICT are applied only partially within the public policy environment and are used to popularise participatory budgets and to facilitate the process of voting for the submitted propositions.

Problems of the Legal Structure of the Participatory Budgeting

The article subjected the regulation of the participatory budget to a critical analysis as internally contradictory and controversial (including constitutional doubts). It pointed out some resulting paradoxes and discrepancies between practice and jurisprudence in fundamental issues: the eligible participants and the permissibility of using specific personal data. Because such a state of affairs is unacceptable in a democratic legal state and attempts to resolve it through interpretative means have not yielded satisfactory results, selected arguments for providing participatory budgeting with new legal framework are presented. It also highlighted some benefits that could arise from regulating the participatory budget within electoral law (as a distinct type of local referendum) and proposed in an outline some specific solutions.

The Constitutionally Determined Scope of Jurisdiction of Regional Chambers of Auditors over Participatory Budget Resolutions

The relevance of the constitutional category of supervision over the activities of local self-governments implies the necessity to study the relatively new institution of public participation, which is the civic budget (synonymously participatory budget). On the scientific ground, it is worth considering whether the legislative changes made in 2018, creating a statutory and – in principle – obligatory status for it, have affected the supervision of legal acts undertaken by authorised bodies of the local self-government within the framework of the civic budget procedure. An important and practically significant research problem is therefore which of the constitutional supervisory bodies is materially competent to undertake supervisory actions over legal acts in the field of participatory budget. Its resolution, based on a dogmatic method, is the main objective of this study.