Policy and Politics in State BudgetinG pdf download

Policy and Politics in State Budgeting – Kurt M. Thurmaier and Katherine G. Willoughby

POLICY AND POLITICS IN STATE BUDGETING

This book accomplishes two goals. First, it provides an in-depth description of budgetary politics and policy-making in state budget offices.

 The data rendered in these chapters fills a significant gap in our understanding of state budget processes, and how budgeting and policy-making are linked in state budget offices.

Except for a few important attempts in the early 1960s, very little is written about state budget office activities, which is surprising given their crucial position at the nexus of budgeting and policy-making in many states.

The stories we tell here help public administration and political science scholars understand how we get collective budgetary choices, how state budget examiners influence those choices, and how these examiners make decisions to influence budgetary choices.

The second goal of this book is to present a descriptive model of the decision-making processes of state budget examiners, a model that we believe has significant implications for the larger effort to create a corpus of budget theory that has positive and normative validity.

The lack of a widely accepted budgetary theory of decision-making is no small matter for scholars and students alike. With a few notable exceptions, budgeting scholars seem to be gun-shy about proposing models of budgetary decision-making.

This has been especially problematic at the micro budgeting level, where such a void has been increasingly filled by residual applications of microeconomic decision-making models that portray bureaucrats as self-interested and utility-maximizing.

The model proposed in this book rejects simplistic assumptions of bureaucratic behaviour and presents a decision-making model that accounts for multiple rationalities as the basis for budget and policy decisions by state budget examiners.

Budget examiners themselves, in this case, those in the eleven state budget offices included in our field study, provide substantial evidence of this model.

We wrote this book with three audiences in mind. Scholars of state bud-