Zeguo Deliberative Participatory Budgeting — Random-Sample Citizen Poll Sets Infrastructure Spending, Wenling

In March–April 2005 Zeguo township (Wenling, Zhejiang) combined Deliberative Polling with participatory budgeting. 275 residents were randomly sampled from household registers; 269 completed the pre-poll survey and 235 attended the deliberation day on 9 April 2005, moderated by 16 trained local teachers, with advice from James Fishkin (Stanford) and Baogang He (Deakin).
Participants ranked 30 infrastructure projects (total cost 137 million RMB) against about 40 million RMB available. The poll cost around 100,000 RMB. Knowledge questions rose by an average 8.9% between pre- and post-deliberation surveys.
On 30 April 2005 the local People's Congress voted to fund the top 12 projects, which the government implemented. Participedia describes annual deliberative polls from 2005 to 2018 with modifications; the 2005–2006 rounds covered infrastructure, roughly 30–40% of the budget.
Caveats: the process is government-initiated and advisory to the Congress, and academic study (He, Public Administration and Development) records limitations, e.g. a 2008 budget session nearly derailed when deputies walked out over an omitted school project. Evidence is mostly case-study based rather than independent outcome evaluation.

Read the full analysis: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/am-pdf/10.1002/pad.1853