The main purpose and objective of this study was to contribute to research on the topic of citizen participation in political decision-making. A new democratic strategy trying to tackle the democratic deficit is participatory budgeting. This paper provides an overview of the practice of participatory budgeting globally, while analyzing the effects it has had in the country with the richest experience, Brazil, as well as an analysis of the conditions and prospects for the development of citizen participation in Croatia. The data was obtained through a comparative review of existing literature, examining the publications of local administration, and an analysis of public hearings in the communities studied. The study, based on twenty years of participatory budgeting in Brazil, shows that it has a positive effect on improving the living conditions of vulnerable social strata and that it encourages the development of civil society. A number of studies indicate that the wave of participatory practices spread throughout the world and that from individual experiments, participatory budgeting is becoming the norm in many communities. Pazin is the first successful example in Croatia. There is evidence that citizens of Pazin are not satisfied with the current state of openness of public administration and their participation in this decision-making process is one of the ways to change this.