Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-18T11:24:00.218Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Punctuated equilibrium in democracy and autocracy: an analysis of Hungarian budgeting between 1868 and 2013

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2018

Miklós Sebők Open the ORCID record for Miklós Sebők [Opens in a new window]  and
Tamás Berki
Miklós Sebők*
Affiliation:
Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
Tamás Berki
Affiliation:
Magyar Nemzeti Bank (National Bank of Hungary, Budapest, Hungary)
*
*E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The article investigates the dynamics of budgeting and its explanatory factors in Hungary based on a new database. Previous work for the period between 1991 and 2013 demonstrated that year-on-year changes in budgetary allocations by policy topics show a leptokurtic distribution. This distribution of policy changes is generally associated with the notion of punctuated equilibrium. We extend this analysis to cover over 155 years of Hungarian budgetary history. Our investigation of a database of 2580 spending category observations (covering the period between 1868 and 2013) lends support for the theory of punctuated equilibrium. We also analysed the impact of political regimes on budgetary dynamics. Here we provided empirical evidence for the validity of the informational advantage hypothesis which states that democracies will show lower level of kurtosis than other political regimes. This finding is also in line with the results of available comparative studies.

Keywords

political regimesbudgetingpolicy agendasHungarypunctuated equilibrium
Type
Research Article
Information
European Political Science Review , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , November 2018 , pp. 589 - 611
Copyright
© European Consortium for Political Research 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baumgartner, F.R., Foucault, M. and François, A. (2006), ‘Punctuated equilibrium in French budgeting processes’, Journal of European Public Policy 13(7): 1086–1103.Google Scholar
Baumgartner, F.R., Carammia, M., Epp, D.A., Noble, B., Rey, B. and Yildirim, T.M. (2017), ‘Budgetary change in authoritarian and democratic regimes’, Journal of European Public Policy 2017(6): 1–16.Google Scholar
Baumgartner, F.R., Breunig, C., Green‐Pedersen, C., Jones, B.D., Mortensen, P.B., Nuytemans, M. and Walgrave, S. (2009), ‘Punctuated equilibrium in comparative perspective’, American Journal of Political Science 53(3): 603–620.Google Scholar
Breunig, C. (2006), ‘The more things change, the more things stay the same: a comparative analysis of budget punctuations’, Journal of European Public Policy 13(7): 1069–1085.Google Scholar
Breunig, C. (2011), ‘Reduction, stasis, and expansion of budgets in advanced democracies’, Comparative Political Studies 44(8): 1060–1088.Google Scholar
Breunig, C. and Koski, C. (2006), ‘Punctuated equilibria and budgets in the American States’, Policy Studies Journal 34(3): 363–379.Google Scholar
Breunig, C. and Jones, B.D. (2010), ‘Stochastic process methods with an application to budgetary data’, Political Analysis 19(1): 103–117.Google Scholar
Breunig, C., Koski, C. and Mortensen, P.B. (2009), ‘Stability and punctuations in public spending: a comparative study of budget functions’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 20(3): 703–722.Google Scholar
Chan, K.N. and Zhao, S. (2016), ‘Punctuated equilibrium and the information disadvantage of authoritarianism: evidence from the people’s Republic of China’, Policy Studies Journal 44(2): 134–155.Google Scholar
Citi, M. (2013), ‘EU budgetary dynamics: incremental or punctuated equilibrium? Journal of European Public Policy 20(8): 1157–1173.Google Scholar
DeCarlo, L.T. (1997), ‘On the meaning and use of kurtosis’, Psychological Methods 2(3): 292–307.Google Scholar
Fagan, E., Jones, B.D. and Wlezien, C. (2017), ‘Representative systems and policy punctuations’, Journal of European Public Policy 24(6): 809–831.Google Scholar
Jensen, J.L., Mortensen, P.B. and Serritzlew, S. (2016), ‘The dynamic model of choice for public policy reconsidered: a formal analysis with an application to US budget data’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 26(2): 226–238.Google Scholar
Jones, B.D. and Baumgartner, F.R. (2005), The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Jones, B.D., Sulkin, T. and Larsen, H.A. (2003), ‘Policy punctuations in American political institutions’, American Political Science Review 97(01): 151–169.Google Scholar
Jones, B.D., Zalányi, L. and Érdi, P. (2014), ‘An integrated theory of budgetary politics and some empirical tests: the US national budget, 1791–2010’, American Journal of Political Science 58(3): 561–578.Google Scholar
Jones, B.D., Baumgartner, F.R., Breunig, C., Wlezien, C., Soroka, S., Foucault, M., François, A., Green‐Pedersen, C., Koski, C. and John, P. (2009), ‘A general empirical law of public budgets: a comparative analysis’, American Journal of Political Science 53(4): 855–873.Google Scholar
Lam, W.F. and Chan, K.N. (2015), ‘How authoritarianism intensifies punctuated equilibrium: the dynamics of policy attention in Hong Kong’, Governance 28(4): 549–570.Google Scholar
Levitsky, S. and Way, L.A. (2010), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War, New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lindblom, C.E. (1959), ‘The science of “muddling through”’, Public Administration Review 19(2): 79–88.Google Scholar
Mavridis, D. and Mosberger, P. (2017), Income inequality and incentives the quasi-natural experiment of Hungary, 1914-2008. WID.world Working Paper series, no. 2017/17. https://wid.world/document/mavridis-mosberger-2017/ Google Scholar
Sebők, M. and Berki, T. (2017), ‘Incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium in Hungarian budgeting (1991-2013)’, Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting and Financial Management 29(2): 151–180.Google Scholar
Wildavsky, A.B. (1964), The Politics of the Budgetary Process, Boston, MA: Little Brown.Google Scholar