American Journal of Political Science An Integrated Theory of Budgetary Politics and Some Empirical Tests: The US

We develop a more general theory budgetary politics and examine its implications on a new dataset on US government expenditures from 1791 to 2010. We draw on three major approaches to budgeting: the decision-making theories, primarily incrementalism, and serial processing; the policy process models, basically extensions of punctuated equilibrium; and path dependency. We show that the incrementalist budget model is recursive, and its solution is exponential growth. We assess path dependency by assessing the extent to which the growth curve has a constant exponent and intercept, except when critical junctures, associated with wars or economic collapse, occur. A second type of disruption occurs in the churning that occurs during the equilibrium periods, assessed by examining the non-Gaussian character of the deviations from the growth curve for the equilibrium periods. Empirical tests indicate support for the theory, but with inconsistent findings, particularly adjustments that occur in the absence of critical junctures. Manuscript word count: 8736.