Agency Requests, Gubernatorial Support and Budget Success in State Legislatures

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.

Politics, Interest Groups and State Funding of Public Higher Education

“…The greater the turnout, the more responsive the elected officials become (Sharkansky 1968). Because citizens are generally supportive of higher education (Selingo 2003), and therefore, in states with greater voter turnout, or as voter turnout increases within a state, policymakers may feel compelled to appropriate more funds to higher education.…”

Regulatory Objectives and the Intensity of Unbundling in Electricity Markets

“…At least for bureaucrats in general, empirical evidence seems to support this conjecture in many cases: several papers reveal a striving for mostly considerable budget increases by various American agencies (Sharkansky, 1965(Sharkansky, , 1968LeLoup and Moreland, 1978;Lauth, 1986;Thompson, 1987;Ryu et al, 2007;ASAP, 2008). Blais and Dion (1990) expect a bureaucratic self-interest to exist after (inter alia) reviewing the results of Krueger (1988), showing the number of applicants for U.S. federal jobs to increase when public compared to private wages increase, and Sigelman (1986), suggesting an eagerness for higher agency means to prevail among most American senior administrators.…”

Making Progress in Idaho State Budgeting

“…Otter's "support for requests" using variables in the state budgeting literature (e.g., Sharkansky 1968). We defined his support as his recommended amount for a specific budget as a percentage of the amount requested and looked to see whether his support was related to the dollar magnitude of the request ("size") and the percentage increase sought in the request relative to the prior year original appropriation (hereinafter referred to as "acquisitiveness").…”