of insulated expert decision-making (i
2
) can be more attractive than the participatory budgeting
mechanism. On the account that I have offered, the chief virtue of the OP lies in its capacity to
tame corruption and undue asymmetric influence with a heavy dose of citizen participation. As
the experience of wealthier cities in North America and Europe illustrates, cities without such
extravagant provisions for empowered resident participation can nevertheless provide basic in-
frastructure investments with integrity and fairness. They do so in large measure through a re-
sponsible, professional, and technically competent administrators that can make public invest-
ment decisions that are both just and effective. In such cities, considered judgments favor the
administrative alternative (i
2
) over the participatory one (i
4
) because it generates good decisions
without requiring residents to invest numerous hours in public meetings. In less wealthy cities
that lack a long history of professional administration, there are two reasons to think that i
2
would be less desirable than i
4
. When public coffers are too shallow to meet all basic needs (e.g.
schools or sewage), the task of setting priorities is a difficult matter of prioritizing values and
preferences. Residents are the best judge of the relative urgency of different needs; it is not a
question that is susceptible to resolution through the application of expertise. Furthermore, with-
out the long process of developing administrative capacity and its attendant norms, municipal
functionaries may be as susceptible to clientelist capture as city councillors. In the context of
Porto Alegre, then, this process of reaching considered judgment about the appropriate demo-
cratic institutions yields (i
4
> i
2
> i
1
). In a place with more accountable parties, the rank ordering
might well be reversed. In a place with a tradition of scrupulous administration, the ordering
might be (i
2
> i
4
> i
1
). But that is only to say something that should be quite uncontroversial: that
Reflective Equilibrium in Democratic Theory — Draft Only!
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