Punctuations and agendas: A new look at local government budget expenditures

Jordan, Meagan M.

doi:10.1002/pam.10136

Cited by 116 publications

(133 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…This evidence supports Jones, Larsen, and Sulkin' s contention that a reduction in institutional friction (here by the dispersal of power and the weakening of veto players) results in a policy process that is less consistent with punctuated equilibrium theory. These findings ϵ represent evidence that the fit of punctuated equilibrium theory to actual processes varies-as others have shown (Jones, Larsen, and Sulkin 2003;Jordan 2003;Robinson 2004). Here the variability of punctuated behavior is confirmed in the context of congressional reform.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

Punctuated Equilibrium and Congressional Budgeting

Robinson¹,

Caver²

2006

Political Research Quarterly

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R ecent attention to policy change has shifted from comparisons across space (cross-sectional studies) to comparisons across time. A popular approach to modeling policy change across time is Baumgartner and Jones' punctuated equilibrium model of policy change (1993). In this model, policies experience periods of stasis punctuated by rare periods of dramatic change. This model has been applied to a wide range of policy outputs and has become a widely accepted account of policy outputs (Jones, Larsen, Sulkin 2003;John 2003). It is now important to move from demonstrations of the existence of punctuated equilibrium to testing explanations of punctuated equilibrium. This writing presents a method for testing hypotheses related to punctuated equilibrium and illustrates this method by testing a hypothesis related to reform of congressional policymaking in the 1970s. The first section reviews the evidence supporting punctuated equilibrium theory in policy research. Next, a hypothesis relating congressional reform efforts to congressional policymaking is tested. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the conceptual and methodological limitations of the punctuated equilibrium literature.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

Punctuated Equilibrium and Congressional Budgeting

Robinson¹,

Caver²

2006

Political Research Quarterly

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“…Likewise, non-allocational functions like energy, finance, transportation, and public lands are both above and below the kurtosis of the overall distribution. Thus, these findings do not clearly support either Jordan (2003) or Breunig and Koski (2012).…”

Section: Budget Changescontrasting

confidence: 60%

Agenda instability in Pennsylvania politics: Lessons for future replication

Mallinson

2016

Research & Politics

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Creative Commons NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work as published without adaptation or alteration, without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).Of concern to scholars and the public alike is the extent to which government is attentive to the public's concerns (Jones and Baumgartner, 2004). This means understanding how issues cross over from the public agenda to the governmental agenda (Dearing and Rogers, 1997) as well as how the media and elites shape the public's perceptions of salient problems (Edwards and Wood, 1999;McCombs and Shaw, 1972). One way to study these important issues is to examine how the government allocates attention within a crowded agenda space (Jones and Baumgartner, 2005) and how institutional differences between governments affect their allocation of attention (Baumgartner and Jones, 2009). Much of the comparative work examining these relationships is cross-national; however, the states provide a ripe testing ground for understanding variation in agenda-setting dynamics.Richer analyses of state agendas have proved difficult due to the immense data collection required to replicate portions of the Policy Agendas Project. Presently, such data has only been collected in Pennsylvania (McLaughlin et al., 2010) and remains unexplored regarding its potential for testing punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) in an intuitional context other than Congress. Efforts are underway to collect this data in other states (Haughney, 2014), so it is important to establish a baseline for empirical comparison when using this data to test PET and generate hypotheses regarding how agenda dynamics differ due to institutional variation in the states. To that end, this paper replicates three tests of attention allocation using the Pennsylvania data: (1) whether budget changes exhibit a leptokurtic pattern; (2) correspondence between the public and governmental agendas; and (3) state and national media effects on governmental attention over time (Jones and Baumgartner, 2005).This article begins with a brief discussion of the literature on PET and attention allocation. This will frame the discussion of agenda setting in Pennsylvania and hypotheses derived about how agenda setting may compare to the federal government. After testing these hypotheses, the paper concludes with a discussion of how future comparative research can build on these findings. This article serves as a point of comparison, both methodologically and substantively, for future efforts in understanding how agenda dynamics vary across the states. AbstractResearch on agenda-setting dynamics in American politics has a rich and deep history. Recent efforts to extend this work into other coun...

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“…It cannot predict whether the effects of capital reductions are short-term or whether capital spending and infrastructure maintenance can quickly or adequately recover to prior levels after the recession is over. Based on the apparent change in priorities (Jordan, 2003), previous analysis (Berne & Stiefel, 1993), and evidence of an infrastructure crisis (American Society of Civil Engineers, 2011; Kile, 2011), capital budgets will likely not completely rebound, making it currently too difficult to measure the long-term effects of these choices. The academic community, in league with practitioners, should examine capital spending for many years post-recession to determine if these expenditures return to pre-recession levels and compensate for recession-era reductions.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…receive more stable funding than nonallocational budgets (for public buildings, parks and recreation, highways, etc.) because there is a lower threat of driving away middle class taxpayers (Jordan, 2003). The fear of taxpayer exit results in nonallocational budgets experiencing "higher frequencies of shifts in priority" (Jordan, 2003, p. 357) and more frequent sharp decreases than their allocational counterparts.…”

Section: Cutback Managementmentioning

confidence: 98%

Local Government Capital Spending During and After Recessions: A Cause for Concern?

Afonso

2014

International Journal of Public Administration

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This article combines literature on cutback management with the results of a survey of county commissioners. Specifically, it focuses on the use of capital spending reductions in county government to cope with fiscal stress and the potential long-term impact of such reductions in response to the limited amount of research on this form of local government. In light of the literature and survey results, it recommends that county governments change their behavior and avoid cuts to their capital budgets due to the long-term costs of delayed maintenance and the opportunity costs incurred by stifling economic development. It also presents policy choices available to many counties that enable them to maintain capital investments, including public-private partnerships and earmarked local option sales taxes. The study concludes with a call for quantitative research on the long-term effects of capital reductions during economic downturns.

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Punctuations and agendas: A new look at local government budget expenditures

Cited by 116 publications

References 27 publications

Punctuated Equilibrium and Congressional Budgeting

Punctuated Equilibrium and Congressional Budgeting

Agenda instability in Pennsylvania politics: Lessons for future replication

Local Government Capital Spending During and After Recessions: A Cause for Concern?

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