Soru

Read the passage below and answer the question that follows.

The adoption of municipal participatory budgeting—a process where residents directly decide how to allocate part of a municipal budget—is frequently heralded by democratic theorists as a powerful tool for enhancing civic engagement and trust in local government. Advocates point to cities where public assembly attendance increased and residents reported a greater sense of agency after participating in budget votes. The core argument rests on the idea that giving citizens direct control over public funds changes their relationship with local institutions from passive observers to active stakeholders.

However, this conclusion overlooks the self-selection dynamics inherent in volunteer-based political activities. In most cities implementing participatory budgeting, only a small, highly motivated fraction of the populace attends the public forums where budgets are debated. These individuals typically possess higher levels of education, more free time, and pre-existing civic interest compared to the average resident. Therefore, the observed increases in civic engagement and institutional trust among participants may not reflect a transformative effect of the process itself, but rather the pre-existing traits of the self-selected group. To argue that participatory budgeting causes a general rise in community-wide civic trust is to assume that the participants are representative of the broader public, or that the process is capable of engaging those who initially show no interest in local politics.

Based on the arguments presented in the passage, how should the claims on the left be matched with their corresponding unstated assumptions on the right?