Here’s how we would Spend Ohio Northern’s Money (Probably)

Last week, Northern Review ran an interactive simulation of participatory budgeting for Ohio Northern using quadratic voting. While we’re no longer accepting responses, you can still try the activity here.

Participants were given 100 points to allocate however they wish across nine options for how ONU could spend its money plus an “Other” option.

As a disclaimer, we don’t know who responded, so we don’t know that they’re actually ONU students–for example, one alumnus said they did it in the comments of our Instagram post. Still, except for the niche cases where our work is picked up by larger media outlets (which did not happen here), it is safe to assume that the audience members have some connection to Ohio Northern University, and therefore some qualified experience to declare their preferences for ONU’s finances.

At the end of the week, we had 76 responses (even though 266 of you read the article -_-). The results can be broken down in many ways, and some different summaries follow.

First, we should look at total counts and the projected “winners.” The overall scores for each option, ranked best to worst, are as follows:

1. Increase Financial Aid, 200 net votes
2. Save Half of the Faculty that will be Cut, 166 net votes
3. Third Major Dining Option, 164 net votes
4. Renovate Kinghorn, 124 net votes
5. Health and Wellness Center, 113 net votes
6. Founders Renovation, 106 net votes
7. Save all Academic Programs, 95 net votes
8. Renovate McIntosh, 56 net votes
9. Other, 10 net votes
10. Hill Renovation, 8 net votes

The final results don’t share the whole story, however; the next level of analysis should consider the distribution of individual responses for each option. For example, these graphs reveal that while the Hill Renovation and “Other” options are both close to net zero votes, the Hill Renovation was significantly more controversial among the respondents in getting to this conclusion.

The next level of analysis for our results is to check for association between individual respondents. For visual and conceptual simplicity, I recoded each participant’s response into “Support” (>= 1 vote), “Neutral” (0 votes), and “Oppose” (<= -1 votes). This part can be non-intuitive, and more robust analysis would require performing statistical tests, but I think these graphs are still neat to look at.