Participatory budgeting is a popular method to engage residents in budgeting decisions by local governments. The Stanford Participatory Budgeting platform is an online platform that has been used to engage residents in more than 150 budgeting processes. We present a data set with anonymized budget opinions from these processes with K-approval, K-ranking or knapsack primary ballots. For a subset of the voters, it includes paired votes with a different elicitation method in the same process. This presents a unique data set, as the voters, projects and setting are all related to real-world decisions that the voters have an actual interest in. With data from primary ballots we find that while ballot complexity (number of projects to choose from, number of projects to select and ballot length) is correlated with a higher median time spent by voters, it is not correlated with a higher abandonment rate. We use vote pairs with different voting methods to analyze the effect of voting methods on the cost of selected projects, more comprehensively than was previously possible. In most elections, voters selected significantly more expensive projects using K-approval than using knapsack, although we also find a small number of examples with a significant effect in the opposite direction. This effect happens at the aggregate level as well as for individual voters, and is influenced both by the implicit constraints of the voting method and the explicit constraints of the voting interface. Finally, we validate the use of K-ranking elicitation to offer a paper alternative for knapsack voting.

翻译：参与式预算是一种由地方政府吸引居民参与预算决策的流行方法。斯坦福参与式预算平台是一个在线平台，已被用于吸引居民参与超过150个预算流程。我们提供了一个数据集，其中包含这些流程中通过K-批准、K-排序或背包式初选收集的匿名化预算意见。对于部分选民，该数据集还包含同一流程中使用不同启发方法进行的配对投票。这构成了一个独特的数据集，因为选民、项目和场景均与选民实际关心的现实世界决策相关。通过对初选数据的分析，我们发现，尽管选票复杂性（待选项目数量、需选项目数量及选票长度）与选民花费的中位时间增加相关，但与更高的放弃率并不相关。我们利用不同投票方法的配对投票，比以往更全面地分析了投票方法对所选项目成本的影响。在大多数选举中，使用K-批准方法时，选民选择的项目成本显著高于使用背包式方法，尽管我们也发现少数例子呈现出相反方向的显著效应。这一效应既体现在总体层面，也体现在个体选民层面，并同时受投票方法的内在约束和投票界面的显性约束影响。最后，我们验证了使用K-排序启发方法作为背包式投票的纸质替代方案的有效性。