Scaling Scotland's Nationwide Participatory Budgeting with NLP on the Consul Platform

In 2017 Scotland's local authorities and the Scottish Government agreed a framework committing at least 1% of local government budgets to participatory budgeting (PB), reaffirmed in a revised 2021 Framework Agreement between the Scottish Government and COSLA (Convention of Scottish Local Authorities).

To help PB scale consistently across all 32 Scottish local authorities at once, a research team from the University of Warwick, the Alan Turing Institute and the University of Oxford evaluated NLP tools on the Consul digital platform used for mainstream Scottish PB.

The team used a qualitative longitudinal design combining interviews, process observation and platform-data analysis across live PB study sites to assess whether NLP could ease the scaling challenges of running PB nationwide.

By the milestone reported in 2023, more than 110,000 people had taken part and directly decided how £154 million of council budgets were spent, reaching 1.4% of eligible budgets — above the original 1% target — across all 32 local authorities. The researchers' initial results suggest scaling challenges 'may be tackled using NLP technology,' which had previously shown improved citizen-participation effectiveness in a controlled use-case evaluation.

The NLP findings are explicitly framed by the authors as preliminary; the strongest, independently verified evidence concerns the PB programme's national scale and mainstreaming (COSLA's published spend and participation figures), while the AI layer's effectiveness is still being established through ongoing academic study rather than a completed government evaluation.