The Politics of the Budgetary Process

The budgetary process is part of the political process that affects the public bureaucracy the most. Micro-allocation makes up most of the politics of budgeting. It is at this level that the priorities of individual political leaders interact to produce the allocation of resources within government. Political systems that are relatively poor but that can predict their revenues accurately for a year will engage in "revenue budgeting." The first set of alternatives to incrementalism are attempts to find a more efficient alternative to the familiar incremental outcomes in budgeting. A second form of "rational" budgeting, which has been confined almost exclusively to the United States, is Zero-Base Budgeting. New Zealand was perhaps the first country to experiment extensively with what it then called "bulk budgeting". The structural budget margin illustrates the interdependence of budgeting and other aspects of economic policy.