| Article ID: | iaor1992558 |
| Country: | United States |
| Volume: | 3 |
| Start Page Number: | 35 |
| End Page Number: | 64 |
| Publication Date: | Jun 1991 |
| Journal: | Public Budgeting and Financial Management |
| Authors: | Lowery David |
| Keywords: | government, politics, financial, statistics: regression, time series & forecasting methods |
A new conventional wisdom describes Congressional budget behavior in terms of periods of role stability abruptly punctuated by an episode of discontinuity in the 1970s. It is argued that this characterization of the historical development of institutional budgetary relationships is largely wrong. The conventional view of abrupt change is contrasted with a gradualist naive model and both are tested with 25 years of Congressinal budget data. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the further development of the political theory of the budgetary process.