We explore the impact of institutional design on the distribution of changes in outputs of governmental processes in the United States, Belgium, and Denmark. Using comprehensive indicators of governmental actions over several decades, we show that in each country the level of institutional friction increases as we look at processes further along the policy cycle. Assessing multiple policymaking institutions in each country allows us to control for the nature of the policy inputs, as all the institutions we consider cover the full range of social and political issues in the country. We find that all distributions exhibit high kurtosis values, significantly higher than the Normal distribution which would be expected if changes in government attention and activities were proportionate to changes in social inputs. Further, in each country, those institutions that impose higher decision-making costs show progressively higher kurtosis values. The results suggest general patterns that we hypothesize to be related to boundedly rational behavior in a complex social environment.

Inspired by the agenda‐setting literature, this article outlines a model of issue competition focusing on the interaction between government and opposition parties through the party‐system agenda. Unlike previous studies of issue competition, the model makes it possible to answer questions such as why some parties have greater success than others in forcing other parties to address unpleasant issues. One of the central implications of the model is that opposition parties are freer to focus continually on issues that are advantageous to themselves, whereas government parties more often are forced to respond to issues brought up on the party‐system agenda. Using data on issue competition in Denmark covering 25 years and 23 issue categories, the issue competition model is evaluated and finds strong support in a set of cross‐sectional time‐series analyses.

Political dynamics are likely to proceed according to more general laws of human dynamics and information processing, but the specifics have yet to be outlined. Here we begin this task by examining public budgeting in comparative perspective. Budgets quantify collective political decisions made in response to incoming information, the preferences of decision-makers, and the institutions that structure how decisions are made. Most models to date stress preferences (organized by political parties) almost exclusively. We suggest a quite different approach.We begin by noting that input distributions for complex information-processing systems are Gaussian, providing a standard for comparing outputs against inputs. Next we examine public budget change distributions from a variety of countries and levels of government, finding that they are invariably distributed as double Paretians-two-tailed power functions. We find systematic differences in exponents for budgetary increases versus decreases (the latter are more punctuated) in most systems, and for levels of government (local governments are less punctuated).Finally, we show that differences among countries in the coefficients of the general budget law are probably explained by differences in the formal institutional structures of the countries. That is, while the general form of the law is dictated by the fundamental operations of human and organizational information processing, differences in the magnitudes of the law's basic parameters are country and institution-specific. 2 A General Empirical Law of Public Budgets 1Political systems, like many social systems, are characterized by considerable friction.Standard operating procedures in organizations, cultural norms, and all sorts of facets of human cognitive architectures act to provide stability of behavior in a complex world. In politics, ideology and group identifications provide stable guides to behavior in complex circumstances. In politics, however, a second source of friction exists: institutional rules that constrain policy action. In the United States, policies can be enacted only when both houses of congress and the president reach agreement on a measure. In parliamentary democracies, action may be constrained by the necessity to put together multi-party governing coalitions.Institutional rules 'congeal' preferences (Riker 1980), making it difficult for new policies to enter the political arena.In the past, scholars characterized these systems using comparative statics, a method of analysis that concentrated on equilibrium processes based on the preferences of decisionmakers. (Shepsle and Weingast 1987, Krehbiel 1998). Change was admitted primarily though the replacement of governing parties through elections, which established a new preference-based equilibrium to which the policymaking system quickly adjusted. But comparative statics ignores the on-going information-processing needs of an adaptive system, and political systems are clearly adaptive systems. They dynamically respond to incoming i...

The distribution of attention across issues is of fundamental importance to the political agenda and outputs of government. This article presents an issue-based theory of the diversity of governing agendas where the core functions of government—defense, international affairs, the economy, government operations, and the rule of law—are prioritized ahead of all other issues. It undertakes comparative analysis of issue diversity of the executive agenda of several European countries and the United States over the postwar period. The results offer strong evidence of the limiting effect of core issues—the economy, government operations, defense, and international affairs—on agenda diversity. This suggests not only that some issues receive more attention than others but also that some issues are attended to only at times when the agenda is more diverse. When core functions of government are high on the agenda, executives pursue a less diverse agenda—focusing the majority of their attention on fewer issues. Some issues are more equal than others in executive agenda setting.

A substantial literature claims that political parties compete over issues by selectively emphasizing favorable issues and avoiding issues emphasized by their opponents. In recent years, this understanding of issue competition has been challenged by empirical studies showing issue engagement to be the rule rather than the exception. To move the discussion beyond the descriptive question about degree of issue avoidance or issue engagement, this article offers a theoretical framework of issue competition that addresses central but hitherto neglected questions about which parties respond to which parties. The main implications of the theoretical framework are tested in a set of statistical time‐series analyses of party interaction in Denmark covering more than 50 years, 24 major issues and 21 elections. These analyses offer support to the ideas that parties are more responsive to the issue agendas of parties from their own party family than to the issue agendas of non‐family parties and that large mainstream parties are more responsive than niche parties to the common issue agenda of the other parties in the party system.