Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Institutions, Attention Shifts, and Changes within National Budgets

本论文研究的重点是年度国家预算中的变化是如何发生以及为什么发生的。目前比较政治学和公共预算方面的文献很少注意到不同支出类别之间的侧重点转移；相反，它集中在赤字、政府规模和特定支出领域。该项目以随机过程方法为基础，将资金分配视为民主政府集体表达的政策偏好，提供了一个模型，将体制结构和注意力转移与停滞和重大预算变化，即预算标点符号联系起来。该模型认识到，公共预算编制往往是多维的，但个人和集体一级的关注通常是单维的。具体地说，研究者分析了制度约束、注意力转移、党派偏好和否决权参与者对丹麦、德国、英国和美国这四个发达民主国家年度预算变动的影响。首先，这篇论文是第一次使用分配方法对国家预算内的变化进行广泛和比较分析。这一方法总体上提供了对预算编制和政策动态的理解。此外，创新的统计技术揭示了预算变化的形状，并揭示了跨支出类别的削减、停滞和扩张的明显因果关系。其次，研究者在比较政治学和政治经济学的文献中加入了人类认知的影响和对政治现象的制度性和偏好性的解释。基于制度结构和注意力驱动的选择的相互作用，该项目对政策结果的稳定性和变化做出了解释。对制度约束和注意力转移的理论关注是基于人类行为的有限理性模型，因此，在最一般的层面上，我探讨了偏好形成和表达的重要性。该项目在以下三个方面具有更广泛的影响。首先，该项目展示了一种通过随机过程研究政治现象的研究策略。这种研究政治的新方法可以用来考察其他形式的政治表现，如政党的议题或法律的产生。其次，更广泛地说，这项研究为政治制度的灵活性和稳定性之间的权衡提供了经验和理论上的见解。这篇论文通过考虑制度、党派偏好和注意力的影响来解决政治系统的响应性。第三，就政策相关性而言，研究国家预算发生变化的方式和原因很重要。年度预算内不同类型支出之间的权衡直接转化为官僚、政客和公众的实际得失。

This dissertation project focuses on how and why changes within annual national budgets occur. Current literature in comparative politics and public budgeting has given scant attention to the shifting emphasis among different spending categories; instead, it has concentrated on deficits, the size of government, and specific spending areas. Building on stochastic process methods and considering the allocation of funds as collectively-expressed policy preferences of democratic governments, this project provides a model that relates institutional structure and attention shifts to both stasis and dramatic budgetary change, i.e. budget punctuations. The model recognizes that public budgeting is often multi-dimensional, but attention at the individual and collective level is usually uni-dimensional. Specifically, the researcher analyzes the impact of institutional constraints, attention shifts, partisan preferences, and veto players on shifts within annual budgets in four developed democracies: Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.The dissertation makes two contributions to academic scholarship. First, the dissertation is the first extensive and comparative analysis of changes within national budgets using a distributional approach. This approach provides an understanding of budgeting and policy dynamics in general. In addition, innovative statistical techniques reveal the shape of budget changes and uncover distinct causal relationships for cuts, stasis, and expansion across spending categories. Second, the researcher contributes to the literature in comparative politics and political economy by adding the influence of human cognition and attention to institutional and preference-based explanations of political phenomena. Based on the interaction of institutional structure and attention-driven choice, the project offers an explanation for stability and change in policy outcomes. The theoretical focus on institutional constraints and attention shifts is based on a boundedly rational model of human behavior and therefore, at the most general level, I inquire into the importance of preference formation and expression.The project has a broader impact in the following three ways. First, the project demonstrates a research strategy to study political phenomena through stochastic processes. This novel way of studying politics can be employed to examine other forms of political representation, such as issue up-taking by political parties or law production. Second and more broadly, the research supplies empirical and theoretical insights into the trade-off between flexibility and stability of a political system. The dissertation addresses a political system's responsiveness by considering the impact of institutions, partisan preferences, and attention. Third, the study of how and why changes within national budgets occur is important in terms of policy relevance. The trade-offs between different types of spending within an annual budget directly translate into actual gains and losses for bureaucrats, politicians, as well as the public.