Punctuated Equilibrium in Public Budgeting in Authoritarian and Democratic Brazil

We explore punctuated equilibrium in public budgets with a focus on Brazil before and after its transition to democracy. Empirical evidence in this area has largely been limited to western democracies, but the differences between authoritarian and democratic regime types suggest important research questions. Our data on Brazil suggest a modest shift from higher to lower kurtosis in budget distributions with the transition to democracy. We interpret that to be related to the greater information-processing capabilities of a democratic regime as well as its greater range of diverse priorities. However, we suggest as well that future research needs to gather much more data on a wider range of countries. We show how this might begin with a review of data available for 26 OECD countries, suggesting great variability among them in budgetary kurtosis, but call for more data collection in non-democratic regimes as the most fruitful research plan going forward.