Group Decision Model to Support the Survey of Alternatives Applied for Participatory Democracy

Participatory democracy has been used in Brazil, and other countries in the world, as a form of social participation in the municipality´s administration. In this sense, Participatory Budget (PB) is a government initiative to expand community participation in decision making on the public budget. However, the procedure normally used to survey the alternatives can lead to errors such as: (1) the alternative selected is not technically appropriate for its implantation, (2) the alternative is insufficient to solve the problem, etc. Therefore, for in order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a group decision model to support the survey of alternatives in PB. This model consists of three basic steps: (1) survey of the problems from the community, (2) suggestion of a set of alternatives to solve these problems and (3) definition of the subset of these alternatives. We applied the Strategic Option Development and Analysis (SODA) in order to understand the problem and it was observed that voters have more facilities in electing problems than solutions.