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In recent years participatory budgeting (PB) in Scotland has grown from ahandful of community-led processes to a movement supported by local andnational government. This is epitomized by an agreement between the ScottishGovernment and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) that atleast 1% of local authority budgets will be subject to PB. This ongoingresearch paper explores the challenges that emerge from this 'scaling up' or'mainstreaming' across the 32 local authorities that make up Scotland. The mainobjective is to evaluate local authority use of the digital platform Consul,which applies Natural Language Processing (NLP) to address these challenges.This project adopts a qualitative longitudinal design with interviews,observations of PB processes, and analysis of the digital platform data.Thematic analysis is employed to capture the major issues and themes whichemerge. Longitudinal analysis then explores how these evolve over time. Thepotential for 32 live study sites provides a unique opportunity to explorediscrete political and social contexts which materialize and allow for a deeperdive into the challenges and issues that may exist, something a widercross-sectional study would miss. Initial results show that issues andchallenges which come from scaling up may be tackled using NLP technologywhich, in a previous controlled use case-based evaluation, has shown to improvethe effectiveness of citizen participation.

Evaluating the application of NLP tools in mainstream participatory budgeting processes in Scotland