A General Empirical Law of Public Budgets: A Comparative Analysis

American Journal of Political Science - Tập 53 Số 4 - Trang 855-873 - 2009
Bryan D. Jones1, Frank R. Baumgartner2, Christian Breunig3, Christopher Wlezien4, Stuart Soroka5, Martial Foucault6, Abel François7, Christoffer Green‐Pedersen8, Chris Koski9, Peter John10, Peter B. Mortensen10, Frédéric Varone11
1University of Texas at Austin#TAB#
2University of North Carolina
3University of Toronto
4Temple University
5McGill University
6University of Montreal
7Université de Strasbourg > > > > > >
8Aarhus University
9*James Madison University
10University of Manchester
11University of Geneva

Tóm tắt

We examine regularities and differences in public budgeting in comparative perspective. Budgets quantify collective political decisions made in response to incoming information, the preferences of decision makers, and the institutions that structure how decisions are made. We first establish that the distribution of budget changes in many Western democracies follows a non‐Gaussian distribution, the power function. This implies that budgets are highly incremental, yet occasionally are punctuated by large changes. This pattern holds regardless of the type of political system—parliamentary or presidential—and for level of government. By studying the power function's exponents we find systematic differences for budgetary increases versus decreases (the former are more punctuated) in most systems, and for levels of government (local governments are less punctuated). Finally, we show that differences among countries in the coefficients of the general budget law correspond to differences in formal institutional structures. While the general form of the law is probably dictated by the fundamental operations of human and organizational information processing, differences in the magnitudes of the law's basic parameters are country‐ and institution‐specific.

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Thông tin xuất bản

American Journal of Political Science

Tập 53 Số 4

855-873

Thông tin tác giả