Budgetary Politics and Decision-Making

Abstract

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.