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Public Budgeting: Policy, Process, and Politics
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Comments/Reviews
Description: Some of the best writings on public budgeting and finance can be found in the journals that ASPA publishes or sponsors. For this volume editor Irene Rubin has brought together the best of these articles--emerging classics that address the most important theoretical and practical problems underlying public budgeting.
The anthology is organized topically rather than historically, with an effort to delineate the issues needed to understand some of the more recent controversies in the field. Rubin's introductory essay and section openers frame the key issues and provide historical context for each article. The collection begins with descriptions of what public budgeting is, where it comes from, and what it is for. It moves on to the relationship between budget processes and outcomes, constraints on budgeting, the legal context in which it operates, and adaptations to those constraints such as contracting out.
The book concludes with a discussion of the ethics and norms that underlie budgeting in a democracy. Throughout the anthology, the emphasis is on areas of disagreement and debate, so students can get involved and explore different viewpoints.
Selected Contents:
Introduction
Part 1. What Is a Public Budget? Origins and Purposes
1. Making "Common Sense" Out of Federal Budgeting, Joseph White
2. Who Invented Public Budgeting in the United States?, Irene S. Rubin
3. The Road to PPB: The Stages of Budget Reform, Allen Schick
Part 2. Budgeting in a Democracy; Institutional Arrangements
4. Paradox, Ambiguity, and Enigma: The Strange Case of the Executive Budget and the United States Constitution, Naomi Caiden
5. The Executive Budget: An Idea Whose Time Has Passed?, Bernard T. Pitsvada
6. The End of Executive Dominance in State Appropriations, Glenn Abney and Thomas P. Lauth
7. Budgeting by the Ballot: Initiatives in the State of Montana, Krishna K. Tummala and Marilyn F. Wessel
Part 3. The Roles of the Key Budget Actors and Decision Making
3.1. Role of the Executive Budget Office
8. The Office of Management and Budget in a Changing Scene, Frederick C. Mosher and Max O. Stephenson, Jr.
9. The Shifting Roles of State Budget Offices in the Midwest: Gosling Revisited, Kurt Thurmaier and James J. Gosling
3.2. The Courts-When and How They Intervene
10. Courts and Public Purse Strings: Have Portraits of Budgeting Missed Something?, Jeffrey D. Straussman
3.3. The Bureaucracy
11. Federal Agency Budget Officers: Who Needs Them?, Herbert G. Persil
12. The Budget-Minimizing Bureaucrat? Empirical Evidence from the Senior Executive Service, Julie Dolan
3.4. Incrementalism
13. Police Budgeting: Winning Strategies, Charles K. Coe and Deborah Lamm Weisel
14. Aaron Wildavsky and the Demise of Incrementalism, Irene Rubin
15. Decision Strategies of the Legislative Budget Analyst: Economist or Politician?, Katherine G. Willoughby and Mary A. Finn
Part 4. The Budget Process
16. Ten Years of the Budget Act: Still Searching for Controls, Louis Fisher
17. Deficit Politics and Constitutional Government: The Impact of Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, Lance LeLoup, Barbara Luck Graham, and Stacey Barwick
18. The Budget Enforcement Act and Its Survival: Congress Hears from Experts, Philip G. Joyce
19. Does Budget Format Really Govern the Actions of Budgetmakers?, Gloria A. Grizzle
20. Participatory Democracy and Budgeting: The Effects of Proposition 13, Jerry McCaffery and John H. Bowman
Part 5. Constraints
5.1. Federalism
21. Changes in Intergovernmental Fiscal Patterns, George F. Break
22. At What Price? Costs of Federal Mandates Since the 1980s, Marcella Ridlen Ray and Timothy J. Conlan
5.2. Entitlements
23. The Inflexibility of Contemporary Budgets, Bengt-Christer Ysander and Ann Robinson
24. Re-establishing Budgetary Flexibility, Ann Robinson and Bengt-Christer Ysander
25. Entitlement Budgeting vs. Bureau Budgeting, Joseph White
5.3. Tax and Expenditure Limitations
26. Constraint and Uncertainty: Budgeting in California, Naomi Caiden and Jeffrey I. Chapman
27. Restraint in a Land of Plenty: Revenue and Expenditure Limitations in Texas, Glenn Hahn Cope and W. Norton Grubb
5.4. Court Decisions and Constitutional Rights
28. Budgeting Rights: The Case of Jail Litigation, Jeffrey D. Straussman and Kurt Thurmaier
Part 6. Privatization and Contracting
29. Competition and Choice in New York City Social Services, E.S. Savas
30. The Need for a Privatization Process: Lessons from Development and Implementation, Bruce Wallin
Part 7. Budget Norms and Ethics
31. Budgetary Balance: The Norm, Concepts, and Practice in Large U.S. Cities, Carol Lewis
32. Federal Budget Concept-Bright Lines or Black Holes?, Thomas J. Cuny
33. Accountability and Entrepreneurial Public Management: The Case of the Orange County Investment Fund, Kevin P. Kearns
34. The Lottery and Education: Robbing Peter to Pay Paul?, Charles J. Spindler
35. The Monster That Ate the United States Senate, Bill Dauster
Index
About the Editor
Comment(s): "This is a well-edited book and is a must-read for students interested in U.S. public budgeting. Irene Rubin has successfully encapsulated the field's theoretical issues and practices, both classic and current. The well-chosen articles are authoritative works on each of their respective topics. They also give us a valuable historical perspective on the future challenges ahead." -- Alfred Ho, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis
Review(s): "For anyone who is interested in understanding budgeting practices, [this text is] well worth the effort." -- Public Administration Review
"The ASPA Classics series has focused and refocused the central issues in the field, both those that have been problematic for generations and those that have emerged more recently. In doing so, the series provides public administration scholars and practitioners with valuable assessments of important parts of the field and indicators of the work to be done to advance theory and practice." -- Public Administration Review
    
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