# The (Computational) Social Choice Take on Indivisible Participatory Budgeting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.00621 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00621/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Mar 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Temporal Fairness in Multiwinner Voting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04417/) (2023)
- [Generative Social Choice: The Next Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22939/) (2025)
- [Method of Equal Shares with Bounded Overspending](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15005/) (2024)
- [The Leximin Approach for a Sequence of Collective Decisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18024/) (2023)
- [Full Proportional Justified Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12015/) (2025)
- [Learning Aggregation Rules in Participatory Budgeting: A Data-Driven Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01864/) (2024)
- [Proportional Committee Elections with Positive and Negative Votes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01985/) (2025)
- [LLMs for Resource Allocation: A Participatory Budgeting Approach to Inferring Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06060/) (2025)
- [Algorithmic Shortlisting in Participatory Budgeting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06577/) (2025)
- [A General Theory of Proportionality with Additive Utilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08504/) (2026)
- [Swimming with Whales: Analysis of Power Imbalances in Stake-Weighted Governance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19264/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this survey, we review the literature investigating participatory budgeting as a social choice problem. Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which citizens are asked to vote on how to allocate a given amount of public money to a set of projects. From a social choice perspective, it corresponds then to the problem of aggregating opinions about which projects should be funded, into a budget allocation satisfying a budget constraint. This problem has received substantial attention in recent years and the literature is growing at a fast pace. In this survey, we present the most important research directions from the literature, each time presenting a large set of representative results. We only focus on the indivisible case, that is, PB problems in which projects can either be fully funded or not at all. The aim of the survey is to present a comprehensive overview of the state of the research on PB. We aim at providing both a general overview of the main research questions that are being investigated, and formal and unified definitions of the most important technical concepts from the literature.