The More Things Change, the More Things Stay the Same: A Comparative Analysis of Budget Punctuations

In this paper, I identify whether shifts within budgets occur and investigate the variation of these shifts. Building on stochastic process methods, I find that budgets in all four cases exhibit mostly incremental changes punctuated by extreme shifts. In order to explain these punctuations in budget distributions, I rely on two models: partisan control of government and partisan distance of the assembly. The two models are tested using national budgetary data across all government functions for Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States since the 1960s. The paper finds that partisan distance increases the degree of punctuations in the German and the British cases, whereas there is some evidence for the partisan control model in the American cases. In the Danish cases, partisan distance reduces the degree of budget punctuations.