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Scholars have long suspected the blanket description of bureaucrats as "budget maximizers" is simplistic and inaccurate. This article provides empirical grounds for questioning that description and enhances our understanding of bureaucratic fiscal preferences. Bureaucratic preferences for expansion are distributed along a continuum. A typology of agency heads' expansion preferences is developed and related to Downs's typology of bureaucrats. Data from eight surveys of state agency heads (1964-98) enable us to trace administrators' preferences for expansion over four decades. These preferences vary substantially in any single survey year and reflect trends across these years. Notably, a substantial proportion of agency heads opted for no expansion in their own agency's programs and expenditures or in the state's overall budget. This typology challenges conventional conceptions of bureaucrats' maximizing preferences, advances alternative interpretations about budget minimizing, and fills an important gap in budget and bureaucracy theory.In few arenas of public administration are the conflicts, contentions, and competition more intense, subtle, and complex than in the arena of budgeting. Kettl (2003, 171) asserts that "budgeting is the nerve center of the political universe-and it can often seem that this center is in chaos." For the better part of the last four decades, budgets, budgeting, and budget theory have been pivot points in this chaos, around which reform, responsibility, accountability, performance, evaluations, and control have revolved.In this article, we describe the variety, variations, and distributions of budgetary preferences. We contend that a better understanding of budgeting behavior is possible if we can better grasp the preferences (goals) that promote actions. Budgetary preferences are relevant and significant variables in the budget process. By describing the diverse Cynthia J. Bowling is an assistant professor of political science at Auburn University. Her research focuses on public administrators, bureaucracy, and policy within the broader state and local government context. She is currently involved in research to identify and explain patterns of female representation in state agency head positions over the last four decades.

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This article addresses a long-standing question in public budgeting: What factors influence bureau/agency budget request decisions? Empirical results confirm the complexity of variables that explain different levels of budget requests by over 1,000 state administrative agencies. The expected significant influence of administrator (agency head) aspirations was clearly present. But other important sources enter into the decision of agencies to satisfy rather than maximize. These include the strategic roles, activities, and priorities of governors, legislatures, and interest groups. These political principals' influence operates to constrain, discipline, or even augment agency budget requests.

Budgetary incrementalism argues that three institutional actors—agencies, executive budget offices, and legislative committees—dominate budget outcomes. The complexity and interdependency of public programs expands this expectation to include the influence of exogenous budget factors. Findings from a survey of state agency heads reveal that budget environments do influence state agency budget outcomes. However, the institutional budgetary participants, especially governors and legislatures, envisioned in classical incrementalism retain their principal and primary influence on state agency budgets. A significant departure from classical incrementalism is that agencies are not as influential as previously depicted.