Decide Madrid

The bet

Decide Madrid came directly out of 15-M, the anti-austerity movement of 2011, which had demanded that Spanish institutions find real ways to let citizens shape decisions. When Manuela Carmena's Ahora Madrid won the city in 2015, it answered with a platform. Any resident could post a proposal, back other people's, debate them, and help decide part of the municipal budget.

The promise went further than most consultations dare. A proposal that gathered enough support would be carried out by the city. Madrid wasn't offering to consider citizens' ideas. It was offering binding, bottom-up democracy at the scale of a capital city.

Peak

For a few years Decide Madrid was the case everyone in the field pointed to. Registered users passed 400,000 by the end of 2018 (MDPI). By the end of 2018, residents had filed more than 25,000 proposals. The participatory budget grew from €30 million to €100 million, and in 2018 the platform won a United Nations Public Service Award.

Its open-source software, Consul, spread to Paris, Turin, Buenos Aires and dozens of other cities. Barcelona's Decidim began as a fork of it.

What worked

People came, in the hundreds of thousands. That alone answers anyone who still claims citizens won't use online participation. The participatory budget was the one format with a monitoring process, and it produced results residents could see. The choice to build open-source gave the effort a life far beyond Madrid. Since 2019 an independent foundation has looked after the software as it runs in dozens of countries.

What failed — the mechanism

The platform opened the door to participation and left the door to power nearly shut. To be carried out, a proposal needed support from two percent of Madrid's entire census. When nothing reached that, the city lowered the bar to one percent. Even clearing it guaranteed nothing.

Outside the participatory budget there was no formal feedback at all. Residents never learned whether anyone had read their proposal, used it or turned it down, let alone why. Silence wore enthusiasm down into disillusionment, and the flagship projects on Gran Vía and Plaza España ended up not reflecting what people had asked for.

The last weakness was ownership. The platform belonged to one administration, not to the city as an institution. After the 2019 election brought in a conservative government, its budget was cut, its processes wound down, and 182 proposals that had already been approved were discarded.

What Agora takes from it

Madrid's documented flaw is that people never heard back. Agora is designed around that problem, and it cannot make an official answer; whether it helps is something Agora still has to show.

The second lesson is ownership. A channel that belongs to one administration can be switched off by the next, so Agora is built as independent infrastructure that doesn't depend on any one government's goodwill. Madrid proved the demand. What it never settled is who is obliged to answer.