referendum. It is a form of participatory budgeting (PB) applied at the state level (henceforth State PB).<sup>4</sup> Here we analyze the last stage of the State PB, that is, the vote in the final referendum, during which the population prioritizes the projects to be funded.

More specifically, we investigate the traits and attitudes of those that cast their ballot via Internet using a post-vote survey. The survey was implemented as an online exit poll at the time of the vote in early July 2012 and consists of 27 questions.<sup>5</sup> The questions aimed to identify the socio-economic characteristics of the respondents, their media and ICT usage habits, as well as their previous level of engagement with politics and civil society.

This study focuses on three key research questions.

- 1) Does the possibility of online voting increase turnout by attracting a group of ‘onlineonly voters’?

- 2) If so, what is the socioeconomic profile of this group? More specifically, are they predominantly young, educated, rich, males that are familiar with the Internet - as we would expect from the literature on digital divide?

- 3) What is the level of pre-existing engagement of these voters? Are online-only voters already engaged in the public sphere, or does the new venue of participation attract previously disengaged portions of society?

Anticipating the key results of the analysis, nearly two-thirds of respondents (63.1 percent) say that they would not have taken part in the vote if i-voting was not available.<sup>6</sup> This evidence supports the perspective of i-voting as a valid means to increase turnout and the existence of a specific group of individuals who would not have participated otherwise. With regard to the second question, employing simple logistic regressions, this study finds that young, educated and wealthier males that are active social networks users are more likely to identify themselves as online-only voters.

> 4 There are many definitions of what constitutes a participatory budgeting process. At an abstract level participatory budgeting is a democratic innovation that allows citizens to affect the formulation of a budget. Most participatory budgeting processes occur at the city level. They are based on repeated negotiations between the city government and the participants, combining elements of deliberative, participatory, and representative democracy. In order to give a more precise operational definition of this democratic innovation Sintomer et al. (Sintomer et al. 2013) include five additional criteria that distinguish participatory budgeting from other similar programs: (1) the financial and/or budgetary dimension must be discussed; (2) the city level must be involved, or a (decentralized) district with an elected body and some power over administration; (3) it has to be a repeated process (one meeting or one referendum on financial issues are not examples of participatory budgeting); (4) the program must include some form of public deliberation within the framework of specific meetings/forums (the opening of administrative meetings or classical representative instances to ‘‘normal’’ citizens are not participatory budgeting); (5) some accountability on the output is required.

> 5 See appendix 3 for full list of survey questions.

> 6 We use the same set of respondents that we use in these models to generate these summary statistics. These exclude missing values.

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