An Evaluation Framework for Budget Reforms: A Guide for Assessing Public Budget Systems and Selecting Budget Process Reforms

While new tax proposals are evaluated with reference to formal evaluation criteria, no such standards exist for evaluating budget proposals. We propose an analytic framework to assess budgets across a series of dimensions, including whether it instills aggregate fiscal discipline, facilitates strategic prioritization of expenditures, and encourages effective and efficient use of budgeted resources, offering fiscal stability. The process also may be transparent, timely, and support public awareness and participation. We use this framework to evaluate the US budget, considering both areas of systematic inefficiency, while reviewing the history of budget reforms. We examine recent, frequently offered proposals that target specific budget process goals, considering how each affects all the budgeting goals, including interactions. We consider how a potential reform, aimed at addressing the failure to accomplish one normative goal, may impacts other goals, sometimes to the point of undermining overall progress.     

Armed Groups as Political Parties and Their Role in Electoral Politics: The Case of Hizballah

In recent decades, armed groups have shown an increased interest in creating political parties to take part in institutional politics. By using these political wings to participate in elections and win public office, some of them have gained enormous political power. However, despite the important real-world implications of this trend, the existing literature on the topic is still underdeveloped. This article contributes to a better understanding of this subject by examining the factors that motivate armed groups to set up a political wing and compete in elections and by assessing how political participation affects an armed group's strategic outlook. The hypotheses on political wing formation and development are tested by analyzing the decision-making patterns of Hizballah. The findings suggest that the political involvement of armed groups does not follow a linear development process from armed to political organization, but instead assumes cyclical patterns: political accommodation and armed struggle are chosen in turn in response to shifts in the relation and the internal balance of power between a given group's political and armed wings.     

TEN YEARS AFTER: THE US CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET AND IMPOUNDMENT CONTROL ACT OF 1974

The reformed congressional budget process is no longer new. This fact alone invites an assessment of the experience of budgeting under the procedures enacted in 1974. But there is a more pressing reason for undertaking such an assessment. Today, there is widespread unhappiness with the congressional budget process. In recent years the deadlines of the budget process have repeatedly not been met, resulting in incomplete budgeting and the proliferation of proposals to abolish or reform the budget procedures enacted in 1974.
Consequently, this paper will first outline the reformed budget procedures and establish the goals of the 1974 Budget Act. The second section assesses whether the goals of budget reform have been achieved. In short, the answer is a negative one. The third section explains why the goals of budget reform have not been met, and the final section evaluates the main proposals advanced for changing the budget process.     

Congress and executive branch budget reform: the house appropriations committee and zero-base pudgeting

Local police agencies are in a fiscal crisis prompted by inflation on one hand and citizen tax revolt on the other. However, there is opportunity inherent in the budget crunch. It provides local government and police administrators with unprecedent political leverage to cut budgets in a manner where highly productive programs are retained while the unproductive ones are deleted. To this end the essay discusses avenues, drawn from recent police scholarships, for using budgetary retrenchment as means for substantive police reform.     

Conceptualising and tracing the increased territorialisation of politics: insights from Argentina

The territorialisation of politics is a crucial transformation in state–society relations that has implications on how contemporary politics works. Defined here as the dispute for the physical control of space, be it a municipality, province or portion of land, within one or more politically constituted entities. It does not mean the emergence of a new regime type, but the process through which the territory re-emerges as a new cleavage after neoliberal reforms and authoritarian regimes have weakened/dissolved neo-corporatist arrangements for the resolution of socio-political conflicts in society. It is a cleavage because central political divisions are produced as a result of the physical encounter of or distance between political actors and of the dispute for the control of a territory for sociopolitical goals and causes that are not always territorially defined. Departing from this definition, I also raise potential explanatory hypotheses for the transformations that favoured this transformation in Argentina.     

Budget Transparency in Local Governments: An Empirical Analysis

The aim of this paper is to shed additional light on the determinants of budget transparency in local governments. Our work is based on a Likert-type survey questionnaire specifically designed to measure budget transparency in small municipalities. The questionnaire is based on the IMF's revised Code of Good Practices on Fiscal Transparency (2007). Results from 33 Galician municipalities are used to assess its internal consistency and to test a battery of hypotheses on the determinants of budget transparency. While several previous findings of the literature are confirmed, some new results are also obtained.     

DOES POLITICAL CHANGE AFFECT SENIOR MANAGEMENT TURNOVER? AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF TOP‐TIER LOCAL AUTHORITIES IN ENGLAND

In many political systems the political neutrality of senior managers' tenure is often cherished as a key part of the politics-administration dichotomy and is subject to formal safeguards. We test hypotheses about the impact of political change on senior management turnover drawn from political science, public administration and private sector management theory. Using panel data to control for unobserved heterogeneity between authorities, we find that changes in political party control and low organizational performance have both separate and joint positive effects on the turnover rate of senior managers. By contrast, the most senior manager, the chief executive, is more sheltered: the likelihood of a chief executive succession is higher only when party change and low performance occur together. Thus the arrival of a new ruling party reduces the tenure of senior managers, but chief executives are vulnerable to political change only when performance is perceived as weak.     

Status Quo Bias or Institutionalisation for Reversibility?: The EU's Political Conditionality,Post-Accession Tendencies and Democratic Consolidation in Slovakia

The EU's political conditions have been a consistent and at times salient element in the accession process, since Brussels enlarged their scope and tightened procedures from the mid-1990s. But so far little attention has been given to post-accession compliance with these conditions. This is important, for while the European Commission no longer monitors them, the political conditions were imperfectly implemented by the time of the 2004 enlargement. The question that therefore arises is whether compliance continues or whether there are any tendencies to reverse the process. Using a comparative approach based on four alternative hypotheses, this problem is explored in detail using the case of Slovakia, a country where the EU has been a prominent factor in its return to the path of democratisation after the Me?iar years. Comparing Slovakia's performance on the EU political conditions before EU entry in 2004 and during the three years after, two competing approaches, ‘rationalist’ and ‘constructivist’, are assessed. It is found that the fears of the rationalists have not been strongly justified nor have the hopes of the constructivists been much encouraged. The outcome of political conditionality is related to democratic consolidation in Slovakia, and the conclusion is that the former assisted the latter despite its limitations but much more with respect to reforming institutions than to changing either attitudes or behaviour.     

Town twinning and political support

Does town twinning foster citizens’ political support of the European Union? This study investigates the relation, which is maintained in politics and academics but still calls for empirical evidence. We distinguish between two levels of analysis, namely individual and context level, and differentiate in accordance with David Easton’s modes of political support specific from diffuse support. The corresponding hypotheses are tested with a unique dataset, which embraces survey findings of more than 12,000 respondents from 28 randomly selected municipalities in Germany. The main conclusions that emerge from the analysis are: First, town twinning does promote political support of the European Union on the individual level. Second, there are positive effects on specific and diffuse support. Thirdly, there is no relationship between local activity in twinning affairs and political support.     

Policy Punctuations in Danish Local Budgeting

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.     

MODELLING BUREAUCRACY: THE CASE OF THE AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL BUDGET SECTOR 1982-1992

A substantial literature exists on the economic analysis of bureaucracy, which includes formal models of bureaucratic behaviour by Niskanen (1971) and Dunleavy (1991). This article develops hypotheses from those models about changes in size of bureaux over time and tests them against data on the Australian federal budget sector in 1982–83 and 1991–92. The models predict that bureaucrats usually will be able to influence the size or structure of their bureaux in line with their personal preferences. However, the Australian data suggest that the extent of such influence may be less than is assumed in either model and that the preferences of politicians are more influential than the models allow. One conclusion is that, if bureaucracy is to be modelled, a principal-agent approach will have more to offer than the neo-classical maximizing framework adopted by Niskanen in particular. A further conclusion, at odds with those of Niskanen and weakening his case for wholesale privatization, is that bureaucratic dysfunctions may be amenable to reform of the political and bureaucratic rules and systems.     

Budget Support and Democracy: a twist in the conditionality tale

Budget support—aid delivered directly to developing country government budgets—accounts for a growing proportion of overseas development assistance. In theory it has multiple benefits over other forms of aid in terms of attaining poverty reduction and development objectives. However, recent years have seen several incidents of budget support being frozen, halted or redirected because of slippage in the democratic credentials of certain countries, including Ethiopia, Uganda, Nicaragua, Honduras, Madagascar and Rwanda. This article analyses these incidents in relation to debates over aid conditionality. It finds that donors are willing to apply political conditionality when otherwise good performing governments go politically astray, but it questions whether budget support is a viable instrument for pushing for democratic change. Co-ordinated donor action appears to be increasing, but aid flows to the countries discussed remain high and the governments in question tend to be dismissive in the face of such pressure.     

Remittances,Regime Type,and Government Spending Priorities

Previous work suggests that remittances enable governments to reduce spending on public services and divert resources to serve their own interests. We argue this need not occur. Building on recent work which shows that the impact of remittances is contingent on the domestic environment in remittance-receiving countries, we hypothesize that (1) remittances are more likely to increase government spending on public services in democracies than in autocracies and (2) remittances are more likely to finance activities that deter political competition in autocracies than in democracies. Using a sample of 105 developing countries from 1985 through 2008, we find strong support for our hypotheses when examining the impact of remittances on public education, health, and military spending. We also provide suggestive evidence for the mechanism underpinning our results: micro-level evidence on remittance recipients’ preferences and political engagement.     

Institutional design and legislative conflict: The Russian Supreme Soviet-a well-oiled machine, out of control

This article develops a comparative institutional framework for evaluating the new legislatures of the former Soviet Union, and demonstrates that the conventional wisdom about the Russian Federation Supreme Soviet is wrong. It was not a totalitarian, Soviet institution whose omnipotent and malevolent Chair singlehandedly dominated policy outputs and controlled the membership. Rather, the Supreme Soviet's non-partisan, committee-centered design enabled the committees to dominate the legislative process and to virtually exclude conflict, even on such objectively contentious legislative issues as the annual budget. However, the non-partisan design denied the legislature the mechanisms for controlling the Chair on non-legislative, political issues, particularly in relations with the executive branch. On legislative issues, the Supreme Soviet was a well-oiled machine, but on political issues it was out of control, thus leading to the legislature's demise. This article demonstrates the utility of an institutional framework for comparing post-communist legislatures, and the necessity of disaggregating legislative and political issues when evaluating legislative performance.     

Forever North–South? The political challenges of reforming the UN development system

Member states of the United Nations (UN) agree that its development system needs substantial reform given its fragmentation and outdated structures, as well as new demands from the 2030 Agenda. Yet, a recent two-year reform process yielded no substantial reform decisions. Why did member states fail to endorse the necessary reforms despite almost unanimous recognition of the need for change? This paper describes member states’ conflicting positions on reforming the UN and analyses their failure to delegate authority to the UN development system. North and South, donors and recipients, are locked in a struggle for power and control, maximising bilateral influence at the expense of the benefits of multilateral cooperation. The paper contributes to the pool of UN studies, adding a decidedly political perspective of the reform process. It is based on diplomatic statements, negotiation drafts and interviews with UN diplomats.     

Political Fragmentation and Fiscal Status: Evidence from Municipalities in Israel

Abstract

This article analyses the link between fiscal balance and political fragmentation. While a large body of literature states that political fragmentation leads to fiscal deficits, others suggest that political fragmentation is associated with political competition, which tends to improve fiscal balance. These hypotheses are tested using budgetary and political data of municipalities in Israel for the years 1998–2006. The results suggest that both hypotheses may be correct, depending on voting behaviour. In Arab municipalities, where residents vote according to clan affiliation, low levels of political fragmentation are associated with large debts. On the contrary, in Jewish municipalities, low levels of political fragmentation are associated with small debts, since in these cases, coalition formation requires less spending and is easier to sustain.     

Biased Budgeting in the Public Sector: Evidence from Italian Local Governments

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyse, in terms of presence, determinants and purposes, the misrepresentation of expected revenues during budget formulation and the misrepresentation of actual revenues during budget execution. To this end, we use six-year panel data from Italian municipalities with populations above 15,000. Our results suggest that overestimations of current revenues are more frequent than underestimations, during both budget formulation and budget execution. In terms of determinants, our results highlight the impact on revenue misrepresentation of both political orientation and fiscal stress. Finally, in terms of purposes, we show that revenue underestimation during budget formulation and revenue overestimation during budget execution may contribute to the formation of surpluses. The former, in particular, may allow mayors to create a ‘war chest’ in non-election years, which can then be used to increase net borrowing on the eve of elections.     

Losers’ Consent or Non-Voter Consent? Satisfaction with Democracy in East Asia

In recent times non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Bangladesh have witnessed massive growth in size, budget and scale of operations. They enjoy growing support from international donors and operate outside the direct control of the government. Their handling of the massive funds aside, increasing involvement of NGOs in economic, social and at times political spheres has given rise to widespread concerns about their accountability including their relationships with the government, donors and the community. This article examines and analyses various dimensions of NGO accountability in Bangladesh. Drawing on evidence from the Grameen Bank and the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC)—two of Bangladesh's largest and the most successful NGOs—the paper argues that NGO accountability in Bangladesh has been more rhetorical than real. It shows that while formal accountability measures are in place, they suffer from a range of inadequacies and shortcomings. Consequently NGO accountability has remained weak and ineffective in relation to major agents such as the government, donors and the clients. The article further shows that some of the recent developments, such as the proliferation of NGO operations, government organisation (GO)–NGO collaboration and the growing involvement of NGOs in commercial activities, have imposed further limitations on their accountability to key stakeholders.     

Don’t buy from me Argentina: Politics, economics, and trade liberalization in Argentina, 1992–2001

Recently, while opening their markets to international trade through tariff reduction, developing nations have been quietly adopting nontariff measures that impose new barriers on imports. This study contributes to a literature that assesses reactions to recent widespread economic reform, particularly in the developing world. While analysts have identified many determinants of the reform process, we are only beginning to assess the factors that shape its twists, turns, and even reversals. In particular, we do not yet have a clear understanding of the determinants of governments’ treatment of different groups and actors in this process. This article examines these reactions to trade liberalization in Argentina, an important middle-income nation, by drawing upon the significant body of theoretical and empirical literature on trade policy in developed nations that demonstrates that both economic and political factors condition policy implementation. Utilizing a data set of nontariff trade disputes from 1992 to 2001, the analysis employs probit maximum likelihood techniques to assess the relationship between trade policy outputs and economic and political factors. The findings suggest that economic factors, including import flows, and political factors such as the breadth of representation appear to condition trade policy decisions in Argentina. The results also suggest that overall macroeconomic context affects policy outputs. Jeffrey Drope is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Miami. His recent articles and current research examine the political economy of trade policy and, more generally, how interests and institutions interact to generate policy. I thank Wendy Hansen, Ken Roberts, and theSCID reviewers and editors for valuable comments, the Latin American Institute at the University of New Mexico for financial support, and Pablo Sanguinetti for helpful introductions in Argentina.     

THE USE OF PERFORMANCE INFORMATION IN BUDGETARY DECISION‐MAKING BY LEGISLATORS: IS ESTONIA ANY DIFFERENT?

The goal of this article is to examine to what extent legislators in Estonia use performance information in budgetary decision‐making. Interviews with the members of the finance committee of the parliament show that legislators make only limited use of the formal documents containing performance information. Instead, they rely, for the most part, on informal social networks for gathering information they consider necessary for budget discussions. According to the legislators, the main reasons for limited use of performance information are the following: the documents containing performance are too long and cumbersome, the legislative budget process is too time‐constrained, and the parliament has only a limited role in making substantive changes to the budget. The study also indicates that more experienced politicians are less interested in performance information than the novices but there are no significant differences between legislators from governing and opposition parties.