Abstract:

This article aims to analyse the functioning of solecki fund (SF) mechanism as a form of participatory budgeting in Poland in the years 2009-2018, in terms of the scale of its use by local governments, depending on the level of income. The reason for undertaking this research is the observed dynamic increase in the number of municipalities using SFs as a tool of co-governance. The detailed analysis of data covers the period 2014-2018 due to availability of data in the CSO database and due to legal regulations that were changed in 2014. The analysis included all rural and urban-rural municipalities in Poland. Most of all, this research concerned the affluence level of municipalities measured by the amount of current income per capita and the use of possibility of creating SF by these municipalities, as well as the level of refinancing that could be obtained from the state budget. Due to the fact that the refinancing mechanism is supposed to be a stimulus for implementation of SFs, the hypothesis about the lack of correlation between the level of current income per capita in the municipality and the introduction of SF in the municipality was verified, with the use of Pearson’s independence test χ². The research results indicate an occurrence of correlation between these two variables. Moreover, there is also a significant differentiation in the scale of use of the SFs in individual regions and types of municipalities.