No abstract

This is a study of the budget success of state administrative agencies. Although a number of recent studies provide valuable information about environmental influences on state and local government expenditures, relatively little is known about the factors that affect the budgets of individual administrative units. Existing studies typically focus on the state as the unit of analysis, and report findings about the correlates of state (or state plus local) government expenditures in total and by the major fields of education, highways, public welfare, health, hospitalset al.The United States Bureau of the Census provides an invaluable service for this scholarship by collecting state and local government data and ordering it into categories that permit state-to-state comparisons. When political scientists and economists rely exclusively on Census Bureau publications, however, they preclude an attack on certain aspects of the expenditure process. In order to report data by the comparable fields of education, highways, public welfare etc., the Bureau of the Census rearranges the expenditures made by individual state agencies. As a result we know little about the factors that affect the budgets of individual agencies. And because it is the agency's budget that is the focus of budget-making, we have no systematic information about many of the influences that might affect government expenditures. Chief among the unknowns are the influence of each agency's budget request in the expenditure process, and the support given to the agencies by the governor.

A question often posed by students of American state politics is: “Do state political systems leave a distinctive imprint on patterns of public policy?” Prior to recent years the nearly automatic response of political scientists was an unqualified “yes.” More recent research has led to a qualified but increasingly confident “no.”Several recent publications have explored relationships between various indices of state politics, socio-economic characteristics, and public policy. The general conclusion has been that central features of the political system such as electoral and institutional circumstances do not explain much of the variation in policy. There are occasionally high correlations between individual measures of voter turnout, party competitiveness, or the character of state legislatures and some aspects of governmental spending. But these political-policy correlations seem to disappear when the effect of socioeconomic development is controlled.These are disturbing findings. They have not gone unchallenged. But the challenges, rather than reassuring those who have asserted the relevance of parties, voting patterns, and government structures, have demonstrated that the burden of proof now rests on those who hypothesize a politics-policy relationship. The problem has not been resolved.Part of the problem may rest on the conceptualization and measurement of the central variables. Electoral balance or alternation in office is not “inter-party competition,” except in the most mechanical sense. Compare Massachusetts' loose-knit party structure to the centralization of Connecticut's. “Party competition” is not the same as “party organization.” And party competition, voting habits, and patterns of apportionment fall far short of being equivalents of “political systems.”

Much recent policy analysis is based on the assumption that the amount of money spent in a jurisdiction indicates the nature of services provided. This study seeks to test this assumption as it applies to the American states.Among the studies that have attempted to explain the “outputs” of state and local governments by reference to political and economic characteristics, several have identified expenditures with services implicitly by mixing indicators of spending with indicators of services as the “outputs” to be explained. Other studies have claimed explicitly that government expenditures reflect the “scope and character” or “calibre” or the “alpha and the omega” of public services. A contrary argument is that “money is not everything.” Such nonmonetary factors as the quality of personnel or the nature of the political environment may exert the greatest influences upon the quality or quantity of public services within a jurisdiction.In assessing the relationship between spending and services, this study first defines static relationships between measures of spending and measures of public services. Secondly, it examines relationships over time in an attempt to discern if increases in government expenditures are likely to bring about increases in the quality or quantity of public services.

A purist conception of audit independence appears to be obsolete. A survey of audit activities of the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) and Israel's State Comptroller describes pressures on audit bodies to examine sensitive policy issues and to enter partisan and personal squabbles between elected officials. The critique of the GAO by the National Academy of Public Administration recommends that legislators refrain from asking the audit body to deal with politically sensitive issues. In order to salvage something from the principle of audit independence, it appears more realistic to urge diligence on the part of the supreme auditor.