Budget decision making at the grass-root's level

What drives decision processes in public administration? Decisions made in the public sector routinely involve public money and public trust; yet, the question posed by V.O. Key: on what basis shall we decide to allocate funds to one program instead of another? has become more rhetorical than answerable. Nevertheless, the answer to this question may be the ‘essence’ of decision making in public administration. The objective of this paper is to contribute to an understanding of this essence. This study surveys city managers, nationally, to examine and assess the utility and applicability of current decision models presented in the literature to explore which models are valuable to managers. The results show that city managers are incremental decision makers and overwhelmingly reject technocratic methods. Furthermore, there may be a heuristic thread that pervades all decision models, affecting the decision model choice.