Topping Off and Bottoming Out: Setting Budget Priorities Through Executive Power

This article examines the role of the institutional power of executives in public budgeting; specifically, how executives change spending on particular budget items. Leveraging extant theories of the policy process concerning preference expression, attention, and institutions, we argue that executives deepen large cuts and boost large increases in budgetary change. The strictures of the budgetary process force trade‐offs for executives in preference expression such that increases to preferred categories typically require decreases in other categories. Literatures in public policy and political representation suggest that all executives would like to express fiscal preferences, thereby contributing to categorical budget oscillations; however, not all executives are created equal. We employ quantile regression to examine whether the institutional strength of governors determine cuts, stasis, and expansion in spending across all budget functions in the American states between 1985 and 2009. Our model includes a host of political and economic variables found in the literature of fiscal policymaking, such as partisanship and divided government. The desire to change policy may be widely shared across executives, but we find that the ability to “top off” categorical increases and bottom out categorical decreases is a function of an executive's capacity to call attention to preferred categories via agenda‐setting power and to secure those changes via veto power. The findings show strong governors are well positioned to influence public policy through the budgetary process. 摘要 本文考察了行政管理人员在公共预算中的制度性权力角色；具体而言, 本文考察了行政人员如何改变对特定预算项目的支出。通过权衡现有的关于偏好表达、关注和制度的政策过程理论, 我们认为, 行政人员强化了预算的大幅削减, 也推动了预算的大幅增加。公共政策和政治代表性领域内的文献表明, 所有行政人员都有意愿去表达他们的财政偏好, 这导致了财政振荡, 进而带来了分化；但是, 并不是所有的行政人员都是平等的。我们采用分位数回归法来检验州长的制度性力量是否决定了 1985 年至 2009 年间美国各州所有预算支出的削减、停滞和扩张。我们的模型包括了财政政策制定文献中的许多政治和经济变量, 如党派政治和分治政府。改变政策的愿望可能广泛存在于各行政管理人员之中, 但是我们发现, 是否能实现“自上而下”类别的增长和“自​​下而上”类别的降低, 取决于行政人员的能力, 包括如何通过议程设置来唤起人们优先关注指定类别的能力, 以及通过否决权来确保实现这些改变的能力。调查结果显示, 强大的州长有能力通过预算过程来影响公共政策。