Budget Procedures and the Size of the Budget: Evidence from Danish Local Government

Blom‐Hansen, Jens

doi:10.1111/1467-9477.00064

Cited by 17 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Seventh, it is important to keep in mind that there may be multiple reasons why municipalities do not keep their budgets. The analyses below therefore include a number of factors demonstrated to be important by prior studies of local budget overruns (Houlberg 1999; Serritzlew 2005; Blom‐Hansen 2002). The size of the budget : A small budget is more vulnerable to changed needs during the budget year than a large one.…”

Section: Methods and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Municipal Amalgamations and Common Pool Problems: The Danish Local Government Reform in 2007

Blom‐Hansen

2010

Scandinavian Political Studies

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Amalgamating municipalities carries risks in terms of public expenditure control. The tax base of the new amalgamated municipality represents a common pool resource. The incentive is to exploit it -that is, to spend before closing time. This article investigates last-minute spending by Danish municipalities before the local government reform in 2007 in which 271 municipalities were reduced to 98. It shows that local councillors exploited this situation to finance local projects before closing time. The article thus demonstrates the occurrence of common pool problems in amalgamation situations. However, it also shows that it is the availability of a common pool that matters, not its size.

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Section: Methods and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Municipal Amalgamations and Common Pool Problems: The Danish Local Government Reform in 2007

Blom‐Hansen

2010

Scandinavian Political Studies

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“…Fiscal outcomes are influenced by factors other than jurisdiction size, and we include a set of control variables that previous studies have shown to be important for budgeting and fiscal management in Danish municipalities (Blom‐Hansen 2002; 2010; Hansen 2011; 2012; Houlberg ; Serritzlew ). First, we include a dummy for five small island municipalities since the extraordinary smallness in scale brings particular economic conditions and vulnerability to environmental changes.…”

Section: Description Of the Case And Empirical Specificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Municipal Mergers Improve Fiscal Outcomes?

Hansen

Houlberg²,

Pedersen³

2014

Scand Pol Stud

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Improved fiscal management is a frequent justification for promoting boundary consolidations. However, whether or not this is actually the case is rarely placed under rigorous empirical scrutiny. Hence, this article investigates if fiscal outcomes are improved when municipalities are merged. The basic argument is that the conceptualisation of fiscal management in political science is often too narrow as it focuses on the budget and pays hardly any attention to balances in the final accounts and debts – elements of management which are central to policy making. On this background, the causal relationship between municipal mergers and fiscal outcomes is analysed. Measured on the balance between revenues and expenses, liquid assets and debts, municipal mergers improve the fiscal outcomes of the municipalities in a five‐year perspective, although the pre‐reform effects tend to be negative. For liquidity and debt, however, the improvement only entails re‐establishing the levels prior to the reform. The testing ground is the recent mergers of Danish municipalities, which, it is argued, constitute a quasi‐experiment. This forms the basis of a Difference‐in‐Difference design, allowing the alleviation of endogeneity problems and enabling causal inference. The analysis is based on administrative data from the Danish municipalities in the period 2003–11.

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“…Furthermore, Danish local politicians have the right -within certain overall limits negotiated with the national government -to impose local taxes (Blom-Hansen 1999). Finally, many earlier studies, both in Denmark and elsewhere, have utilized local budgetary data in order to test more general decision-making theories (Danziger 1978;Sharpe and Newton 1984;Mouritzen 1991;Boyne 1996;Boyne et al 2000;Jordan 2003;Blom-Hansen 2002;Serritzlew 2003).…”

Section: Policy Sectors Leptokurtic Distributions and Local Budgetingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Policy Punctuations in Danish Local Budgeting

Mortensen

2005

Public Administration

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The central prediction in Baumgartner and Jones' (1993) punctuated equilibrium theory is that over time, public policy will be characterized by a certain pattern of stability now and then interrupted by punctuations. This paper extends the study of punctuated equilibrium theory in two ways. First, I examine whether this prediction is met in a non-US-based political system like Danish local government. Second, I conduct a comparative investigation of stability and punctuations in four public policy areas chosen for theoretical purposes. Using a stochastic process approach, my findings are that the annual local budget changes, as expected from the punctuated equilibrium theory, are characterized by a certain pattern of stability and punctuations. Equally interesting, however, is the fact that the analysis also reveals some systematic underlying variation, enhancing our understanding of just where budget punctuations are particularly likely to occur, something former studies on punctuated equilibrium theory have not elucidated. INTRODUCTIONIn 1993, Baumgartner and Jones introduced punctuated equilibrium theory as an agenda-based decision-making theory. With its integration of insights from the literature on incrementalism on the one hand and agenda-setting on the other, it provides an explanation of both stability and change in public policy. This is a rare contribution in the field of public policy analysis and probably the reason why their work has influenced a broad and diverse range of public policy studies.Although the punctuated equilibrium theory has already set a new agenda in many subfields of public policy research, it is still a young and relatively uncontested theory, introduced and developed mainly in an American political context. This study extends punctuated equilibrium theory in two ways. First, I apply punctuated equilibrium theory to Danish local budgeting in order to see whether we can reproduce a pattern of stability and change similar to the one found by Baumgartner and Jones in the US federal budget. Second, I argue that the empirical studies published thus far have focused too much on reproducing this pattern of punctuations and stability at the expense of looking for systematic variation within this overall pattern. The examination of such differences is important because it can lead us to a better understanding of where and why policy punctuations are particularly likely to occur, something we still do not know very much about.

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Budget Procedures and the Size of the Budget: Evidence from Danish Local Government

Cited by 17 publications

References 16 publications

Municipal Amalgamations and Common Pool Problems: The Danish Local Government Reform in 2007

Municipal Amalgamations and Common Pool Problems: The Danish Local Government Reform in 2007

Do Municipal Mergers Improve Fiscal Outcomes?

Policy Punctuations in Danish Local Budgeting

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