Budgeting and Governing

Aaron Wildavsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138519855
• eBook ISBN: 9781351530552
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Aaron Wildavsky's greatest concern, as expressed in his writings, is how people manage to live together. This concern may at first appear to have little to do with the study of budgeting, but for Wildavsky budgeting made living together possible. Indeed, as he argues in Budgeting and Governing, now available in paperback, if you cannot budget, you cannot govern.

First published 2001 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 00-062883

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wildavsky, Aaron B.

Budgeting and governing / Aaron Wildavsky ; edited by Brendon Swedlow, with an introduction by Joseph White. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7658-0033-0 (alk. paper)

1. Budget. 2. Finance, Public. 3. Budget—United States. 4. Finance, Public—United States. I. Swedlow, Brendon. II. Title.

HJ2005 .W378 2000

336—dc21 00-062883

ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-0625-1 (pbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0033-6 (hbk)

Contents

Editor’s Preface, Brendon Swedlow

Introduction, Joseph White

Part 1: Making Budgets

1. A Budget for All Seasons? Why the Traditional Budget Lasts

2. The Political Economy of Efficiency: Cost Benefit Analysis, Systems Analysis, and Program Budgeting

3. Rescuing Policy Analysis

4. Toward a Radical Incrementalism: A Proposal to Aid Congress in Reform of the Budgetary Process

5. The Annual Expenditure Increment

6. Budgetary Reform in an Age of Big Government

7. Equality, Spending Limits, and the Growth of Government

Part 2: The Culture of Budgeting

8. Toward a Comparative Theory of Budgetary Processes

9. Prologue to Planning and Budgeting in Poor Countries

10. The Movement toward Spending Limits in American and Canadian Budgeting

11. The Transformation of Budgetary Norms

12. A Cultural Theory of Expenditure Growth and (Un)Balaneed Budgets

13. The Budget as New Social Contract

14. On the Balance of Budgetary Cultures

Part 3: Budgeting and Governing

15. Securing Budgetary Convergence within the European Community without Central Direction

16. If You Can’t Budget, How Can You Govern?

Postscript, Brendon Swedlow

Index

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 first appeared in Public Administration Review 38, 6(November/ December 1978): 501-9; also in B. Geist, ed., State Audit:Developments in Public Accountability (London: Macmillan, 1981): 253-68.

Chapter 2 first appeared in Public Administration Review 26, 4 (December 1966):292-310.

Chapter 3 first appeared in Public Administration Review 29, 2 (March/April 1969): 189-202.

Chapter 4 first appeared in Congress: The First Branch of Government: Twelve Studies of the Organization of Congress (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1966): 115-65.

Chapter 5 first appeared in The Public Interest 33 (Fall 1973): 84-108; also cited as Working Papers on House Committee Organization and Operation, Select Committee on Committees, U.S. House of Representatives (Washington, DC: GPO,1973).

Chapter 6 first appeared in Thomas Vocino and Jack Rabin, eds., Contemporary Public Administration (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1981): 261-91.

Chapter 7 first appeared in C. Lowell Harris, ed., Control of Federal Spending, Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 35, 4 (1985): 59-71.

Chapter 8 first appeared in Budgeting: A Comparative Theory of Budgetary Processes, 2nd edition (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1986): 7-27.

Chapter 9 first appeared in Planning and Budgeting in Poor Countries (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1974).

Chapter 10 first appeared in Canadian Public Administration 26, 2 (Summer 1983): 163-81.

Chapter 11 first appeared Australian Journal of Public Administration 42, 4 (December 1983): 421-32.

Chapter 12 first appeared Journal of Public Economics 28 (1985): 349-57.

Chapter 13 first appeared in Journal of Contemporary Studies 5, 2 (Spring 1982): 3-20.

Chapter 14 first appeared in Ralph Clark Chandler, ed., A Centennial History of the American Administrative State (New York: Free Press, 1987): 379-413.

Chapter 16 first appeared in Annelise Anderson and Dennis L. Bark, eds., Thinking About America: The United States in the 1990s (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1988): 265-75.

Editor’s Preface

This is the third title in a series of Aaron Wildavsky’s writings being published posthumously by Transaction.¹ Perhaps two months before his death in September 1993, he went through his vita with me, his research assistant, selecting articles he wished to include in several collections of his papers. He also asked me to search for additional suitable material, including book chapters. We discussed this collection just once more, and then only to the limited extent of agreeing that it should begin with his retrospective on his first budgeting article, the precursor of his path-breaking Politics of the Budgetary Process. With three exceptions, then, the articles in this collection include all of the pieces Aaron selected,² as well as seven additional papers, two of which were suggested by Joe White,³ the last student to write a budgeting dissertation and book with Aaron. Joe and I also worked together to sequence and group these pieces into the present arrangement. With one exception, all of the papers here were published previously.

The organization of the collection runs from an introductory section that provides an overview of Aaron’s early and final ideas about the political and cultural context of budgeting, including some theoretical discussion, to the incremental theory of budgeting with which he began, to empirical support for the theory, to analysis and criticism of non-incremental reform attempts, and from there to advocacy of incremental reforms—all within the context of American national government. From there, the collection moves to comparisons with budgeting in cities and other countries, beginning with what is perhaps his most comprehensive theoretical statement, encompassing not only culture, but the structural conditions of wealth and certainty, to predict budgetary practices and outcomes all over the world. Following this is a section given over entirely to his cultural analysis of budgeting, where the theory is invoked to explain the causes of budgetary growth, imbalance, and content, as well as the history of American budgeting from colonial to contemporary times. The collection concludes with what was Aaron’s primary political, as opposed to scholarly, concern: articles that are as much analysis as advocacy of the (here budgetary) requisites of democratic self-government. Indeed, as he asks in the last piece here, “If you can’t budget, how can you govern?”

This collection distinguishes itself from Aaron’s many other budgetary books in at least four significant ways. First, it gathers in one place his important collaboration with Otto Davis and M.A.H. Dempster, which allowed a rigorous test of the behavioral regularities he thought he had discovered in the Politics of the Budgetary Process. Second, it collects his side of the debate with those who would try to take the politics out of the budgetary process. To the extent this debate centers on particular reform proposals, it may appear dated, but such a reading is misleading for similar proposals with similar flaws are almost a perennial occurrence. If present and future budgetary reformers can survive the concentrated blast found in these pages, they may with some justification conclude that their proposals have merit. Third, since this collection is organized largely chronologically, it allows readers to trace the development of Aaron’s thinking about budgeting. Fourth, and he would say most importantly, it gathers in one place the papers that represent the most significant single shift in his conceptualization and analysis of the subject: his “cultural theory” of budgeting. In a postscript, I survey his efforts to apply this theory in this context, suggest how it might be extended to budgetary topics he had previously analyzed in other terms, try to answer criticism, and offer some illustrations of how this anthropological approach might improve future budgetary theorizing.

The scanning or digitalization of Aaron’s papers was done by several hardworking Berkeley undergraduates at the Odin Corporation, headed by Sasha Dolbrovsky and assisted by Elise Knowles, Janna Israel, and Jamie Molden. Aaron’s long-serving administrative assistant, the late Doris Patton, who, with another research assistant, David Schleicher, also worked to put the notes in a common format, painstakingly removed the considerable errors introduced by this still imperfect process. Aaron’s colleagues at the Survey Research Center, Henry Brady and Percy Tannenbaum, took turns monitoring our progress and offered advice and assistance to keep things moving along. Aaron’s widow, Mary Wildavsky, and his publisher and longtime friend, Irving Louis Horowitz, did the same from afar. John Elwood read a draft of Joe White’s introduction, and Joe, Percy, Naomi Caiden, Richard Coughlin, Margarita Decierdo, Mary Douglas, Richard Ellis, Richard Gunther, Chandra Hunter, Charles Lockhart, Rob Pirro, James Savage, Allen Schick, Michael Thompson, and the late Marcia Whicker commented on my postscript. The Bradley and Smith-Richardson foundations generously supported this large and extended undertaking, while the director of the Survey Research Center, Michael Hout, allowed us the continued use of Aaron’s offices.

This collection would not be here in its present form without the contributions of all of these people and organizations. But it would not be here at all without Aaron, who in this multimedia age stands out as a resolute “content provider.” Not that he took himself that seriously. He thought that our academic scribblings were only optimistically called knowledge. But he wrote this stuff, while all we have to do is read it. And he hoped that we would. He wanted his collected papers “to say things of interest to contemporary readers,” to “stand on their own,” to include only things of “lasting significance.” He intended to update old material, provide retrospectives on predictions, “however badly the world [had] treated [them],” and add new pieces, “so as to keep faith with [his] conception of collected essays as a living and growing organism, not gray with dust, but green with life.”⁴ Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to shape this collection in exactly the way he would have liked. But we hope any shortcomings do not hide the green sprouting amid any grays. In fact, Aaron’s absence from the final composition of this collection testifies to the power of his original analyses. With this work, he is with us still.

Brendon Swedlow

Oakland, California

Notes

1. The first posthumous title, Culture and Social Theory, edited by Sun-Ki Chai and me, contains essays on the social construction of the concepts of public goods, externalities, and national productivity that should also be of interest to readers of this collection. The second posthumous title, Federalism and Political Culture, edited by David Schleicher and me, contains essays on the proper character of public administration in a truly federal system, which may also be of interest to readers of this collection. Both were published by Transaction in 1998.

2. Aaron had wanted to include his earliest budgeting article, “Political Implications of Budget Reform,” but I felt that it was already adequately represented since his included retrospective on that piece consists of adding italicized paragraphs to it. Another piece he selected, but which I did not include, is his introduction to a volume he co-edited with Michael J. Boskin, “Toward a New Budgetary Order.” Most of the text of this piece is reprinted in the “The Budget as New Social Contract,” which he also wanted to include, and which is more comprehensive, so I kept it and dropped the other. Finally, I substituted the 1988 “A Cultural Theory of Budgeting” for the 1985 “Budgets as Social Orders” he selected because the more recent piece is a clear attempt to expand the earlier one.

3. In addition to “A Cultural Theory of Budgeting,” I added “The Political Economy of Efficiency” because Aaron’s included retrospective on that piece, “The Political Economy of Efficiency Has Not Changed But the World Has and So Have I,” does not contain enough of the original to make sense without it. I also adde...

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