Here, we elucidate the motives of policymaking through the lens of budget politics in the states. This chapter describes the priorities of state spending and how these spending patterns across ten budget domains evolve in all fifty states between 1984 and 2010. This chapter connects these patterns to the distribution of costs and benefits: Different policy areas offer distinct short- and long-term rewards. Importantly, we show that domains that see large short-term gains tend to find diminished budgetary growth over time. Hence, political actors need to trade off short-term and long-term rewards. Our findings make apparent that the dynamics of policy issues motivate political action.

American governors have specific means – veto and agenda-setting powers – for shaping public budgets. Governors face competing managerial and political pressures when constructing a budget: forces of legislatures, agencies, and parties that demand changes in individual categories contending with the need to deliver the budget as a whole. In addition to managing these competing interests, governors also have their own preferences they wish to express in the budget. This chapter shows how the institutional strength of governors affects their ability to reign in competing demands. Our quantitative analysis shows that governors with stronger powers can make large cuts and raises in budgets even larger: a finding we term “bottoming-out” and “topping-off.” This mechanism has significant consequences for the budget as a whole: Disruptions in spending lead to slower long-term budget growth overall. Hence, executive power leads to less stable policymaking, particularly in instable interest group environments.

Chapter 3 describes perspectivism’s world of objects and its concept of materiality, including the material implications of its notion of reality and the practices in which the material plays a key role. Assumptions about materiality in archaeology are revised by taking the conception of matter in perspectivism and putting it in dialogue with theories of matter in material culture studies. The critical question of material agency in perspectivism, including the possibility of object agency, is taken up. Objects and materiality, under certain circumstances and in specific relational contexts in perspectivism, affect humans and non-humans through a capacity that belongs to them. Two other agencies concerning objects can be identified: the first, proper to objects as things, is their capacity as intermediaries between humans and non-humans; the second is the agency of things as non-human objects rather than as inert things. Lacking a native concept of materiality proper to a case of study in the southern Andes, perspectivism provides a stand-in; its concept of objects as possessing their qualities, and instances in which they are in active relations with humans and other non-humans, enables the analysis of the ontological status of objects in the past.

Perspectivism as an anthropological theory on a par with academic theories is the subject of Chapter 2. The implications for archaeologyn are developed through a type of ‘thought experiment’, conceived as the thoughtful access to the experience of others. This thought experiment starts from a different way of encountering things: objects, after all, may be subjects, according to perspectivism. The consequences of such an experiment for understanding and interpreting the archaeological record are played through.

The chapter provides an overview of the manifestation of perspectivism in areas beyond the Amazon and archaeological cases from various times and places of the world, which exemplify how research has used perspectivism – from understanding it as a native ontology to using only some of its principles to understand the archaeological record or applying it as an anthropological theory to interpret the past from a locally situated approach. Two methodological issues become apparent in the chapter, how to translate other ontologies into our terms and how such a thought experiment can be put into practice when interpreting the archaeological record, whether perspectivist, animist, totemic or other.

Chapter 4 tests the theory through a perspectivist approach to the archaeological record of an Andean society of northern Argentina, the Aguada culture (600–1100 CE). The analysis focuses on the relationships of humans with animals, both domestic and wild, and with a particular class of ceramic objects from Aguada society. The evidence points to modes of relationship that bring into play constructions of otherness and an understanding of the world that accords with a perspectivist ontology. The capacity for transformation of animals and people expressed in ambiguous figures of wild felines and humans reinforces the idea of an unstable world where all is subject to movement, change and metamorphosis. In particular, the relationship between humans and domestic animals, especially the llama, is analysed in domestic contexts and cave paintings. An object-centred case study analyses ceramic models of human and animal heads and bodies made analogously; again, they are treated equally and include human attributes as if they were all entities of the same class. The ceramic evidence further supports the possibility that other species may also have been considered endowed with subjectivity, that is, non-human persons.

Interest groups are critical actors in American policymaking providing support or opposition to policy changes. This chapter investigates the opportunities that interest group constellations create for policymakers involved in public budgeting. We develop and empirically assess the impact of three interest group environments: capture (stable competition among very few groups over time), instability (variegated competition among a changing set of groups), and deadlock (stable competition among many groups over time). We match interest group data to expenditures for all states. Capture and deadlock environments see steady changes in spending on particular issues, while instable interest group constellations result in volatile budgeting oscillating between short-term gains and losses. Therefore, these patterns of policy changes associated with interest group competition provide different opportunities for policymakers.

In this chapter, we bring together motives (issues), means (gubernatorial powers), and opportunities (interest group compositions) using qualitative case studies of four states across several years: two with strong governors (New York and West Virginia) and two with weak governors (North Carolina and Vermont). The size of the budgets in these states varies, but they entail three subcategories that correspond with capture [corrections], instability [hospitals], and deadlock [welfare]. An investigation of twelve policy stories provide evidence for the mechanisms connecting governors and interest groups in periods of budgetary change. The policy stories cover similar temporal periods (2002–2004 and 2008–2010) controlling for national political context. We show that – large or small states – governors attempt to use their powers in all policy domains, but are met with much greater resistance in capture and deadlock categories.

Governors are motivated to change public policy in response to issues and have powers that influence the shape and direction of budgets; however, interest groups are ultimately providing opportunities for action. We conclude with some broad recommendations for institutional and political tinkering in the American states. Specifically, we argue that policymakers can embrace the inevitability of interest group involvement in policymaking and be more thoughtful about the way they structure policies. This process enables diversity – by which we mean more groups with difference and alternative policy concerns – in representation. In addition, we argue that decentralization of gubernatorial power over the budget to alternative institutions could facilitate budgets that are more responsive to problems.