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A General Empirical Law of Public Budgets: A Comparative Analysis
Author(s) -
Jones Bryan D.,
Baumgartner Frank R.,
Breunig Christian,
Wlezien Christopher,
Soroka Stuart,
Foucault Martial,
François Abel,
GreenPedersen Christoffer,
Koski Chris,
John Peter,
Mortensen Peter B.,
Varone Frédéric,
Walgrave Stefaan
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
american journal of political science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.347
H-Index - 170
eISSN - 1540-5907
pISSN - 0092-5853
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2009.00405.x
Subject(s) - punctuated equilibrium , presidential system , politics , distribution (mathematics) , government (linguistics) , function (biology) , power (physics) , political science , institution , perspective (graphical) , economics , public economics , law , computer science , mathematics , paleontology , mathematical analysis , linguistics , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics , evolutionary biology , artificial intelligence , biology
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 .