Budgetary politics and decision-making: Development of an alternative hypothesis for state government

In this article, a study of the budget process in Pennsylvania state government over the two fiscal years 1975-1976 and 1976-1977 is conducted in an effort to develop a hypothesis which accurately reflects the empirical events of the actual process during that period and which takes into account other recent empirical research findings. It is concluded that in state government budgeting there are two distinct styles of budgetary decision-making-distributive and redistributive. As long as the process remains in a distributive mode, rational-comprehensive approaches and techniques may have some success in influencing the final outcome; however, when the process turns from distributive to redistributive, rational-comprehensive analysis is replaced by traditional partisan-mutual-adjustment techniques. Rationality and incrementalism are the two theoretical concepts generally posed as alternative descriptions of government budget-ing and appropriations processes. However, these terms have be-come imprecise umbrella concepts used in the budgeting literature to designate at least three separate phases of the decision-making process, as shown in Table 1. Incrementalism in budgeting has been used to designate any and all of the following: (1) a microprocess: the thought processes of an analyst who copes with complexity by accepting current funding levels as a base with known consequences and gauges the results that would occur by instituting a limited range of small changes in the base (succes-