This dissertation project focuses on how and why changes within annual national budgets occur. Current literature in comparative politics and public budgeting has given scant attention to the shifting emphasis among different spending categories; instead, it has concentrated on deficits, the size of government, and specific spending areas. Building on stochastic process methods and considering the allocation of funds as collectively-expressed policy preferences of democratic governments, this project provides a model that relates institutional structure and attention shifts to both stasis and dramatic budgetary change, i.e. budget punctuations. The model recognizes that public budgeting is often multi-dimensional, but attention at the individual and collective level is usually uni-dimensional. Specifically, the researcher analyzes the impact of institutional constraints, attention shifts, partisan preferences, and veto players on shifts within annual budgets in four developed democracies: Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The dissertation makes two contributions to academic scholarship. First, the dissertation is the first extensive and comparative analysis of changes within national budgets using a distributional approach. This approach provides an understanding of budgeting and policy dynamics in general. In addition, innovative statistical techniques reveal the shape of budget changes and uncover distinct causal relationships for cuts, stasis, and expansion across spending categories. Second, the researcher contributes to the literature in comparative politics and political economy by adding the influence of human cognition and attention to institutional and preference-based explanations of political phenomena. Based on the interaction of institutional structure and attention-driven choice, the project offers an explanation for stability and change in policy outcomes. The theoretical focus on institutional constraints and attention shifts is based on a boundedly rational model of human behavior and therefore, at the most general level, I inquire into the importance of preference formation and expression.
The project has a broader impact in the following three ways. First, the project demonstrates a research strategy to study political phenomena through stochastic processes. This novel way of studying politics can be employed to examine other forms of political representation, such as issue up-taking by political parties or law production. Second and more broadly, the research supplies empirical and theoretical insights into the trade-off between flexibility and stability of a political system. The dissertation addresses a political system's responsiveness by considering the impact of institutions, partisan preferences, and attention. Third, the study of how and why changes within national budgets occur is important in terms of policy relevance. The trade-offs between different types of spending within an annual budget directly translate into actual gains and losses for bureaucrats, politicians, as well as the public.
