Warszawa Participatory Budgeting 2025 Summary
Warszawa hosts Poland’s largest participatory budgeting (PB) program, which offers significant research potential due to its substantial budget, extended vote length, and high voter engagement.
0.5% of the city’s total budget is designated for participatory budgeting. For 2024, this amounted to over 105 million PLN.
75 657 votes were cast. Considering that around 1.8 million people live in Warsaw (and everyone is eligible to vote, even newborns), this results in approximately 4.06% of Warsaw's population participated in the vote.
Voters could cast votes in two categories: one citywide vote (with a choice of up to 10 projects) and one district-specific vote (up to 15 projects).
A total of 1,183 projects were presented for the residents' vote, including 86 citywide initiatives and 1,097 district-level projects.
The 11th edition took place from June 15 to June 30, 2024. Although conducted in 2024, this edition is labeled as 2025, as the selected projects will receive funding in the following year.
Citywide
The total budget allocated for the citywide projects was 31 734 758 PLN and it will be almost completely utilized: the cost of selected projects is 31 730 098 PLN.
Let's have a look how these values changes over last couple of years:
As we can see, the budget has been steadily increasing; however, there is a noticeable decline in the number of votes in the citywide voting. This is somewhat disappointing, as social awareness should be increasing—especially with a higher budget, easier online voting, and growing civic engagement. It's a bit concerning to see this trend.
The average age of voters was almost 39 years.
The vast majority of voters now vote online: 67 288. Only 327 people decided to submit a vote "traditionally". As usual, almost two-thirds of the votes were cast by women:
In citywide voting, people can vote up to 10 projects. Over 70% of voters took full advantage of this opportunity:
The average number of projects selected per voter was: 8.55.