We explore the impact of institutional design on the distribution of changes in outputs of governmental processes in the United States, Belgium, and Denmark. Using comprehensive indicators of governmental actions over several decades, we show that in each country the level of institutional friction increases as we look at processes further along the policy cycle. Assessing multiple policymaking institutions in each country allows us to control for the nature of the policy inputs, as all the institutions we consider cover the full range of social and political issues in the country. We find that all distributions exhibit high kurtosis values, significantly higher than the Normal distribution which would be expected if changes in government attention and activities were proportionate to changes in social inputs. Further, in each country, those institutions that impose higher decision-making costs show progressively higher kurtosis values. The results suggest general patterns that we hypothesize to be related to boundedly rational behavior in a complex social environment.

Political dynamics are likely to proceed according to more general laws of human dynamics and information processing, but the specifics have yet to be outlined. Here we begin this task by examining public budgeting in comparative perspective. Budgets quantify collective political decisions made in response to incoming information, the preferences of decision-makers, and the institutions that structure how decisions are made. Most models to date stress preferences (organized by political parties) almost exclusively. We suggest a quite different approach.We begin by noting that input distributions for complex information-processing systems are Gaussian, providing a standard for comparing outputs against inputs. Next we examine public budget change distributions from a variety of countries and levels of government, finding that they are invariably distributed as double Paretians-two-tailed power functions. We find systematic differences in exponents for budgetary increases versus decreases (the latter are more punctuated) in most systems, and for levels of government (local governments are less punctuated).Finally, we show that differences among countries in the coefficients of the general budget law are probably explained by differences in the formal institutional structures of the countries. That is, while the general form of the law is dictated by the fundamental operations of human and organizational information processing, differences in the magnitudes of the law's basic parameters are country and institution-specific. 2 A General Empirical Law of Public Budgets 1Political systems, like many social systems, are characterized by considerable friction.Standard operating procedures in organizations, cultural norms, and all sorts of facets of human cognitive architectures act to provide stability of behavior in a complex world. In politics, ideology and group identifications provide stable guides to behavior in complex circumstances. In politics, however, a second source of friction exists: institutional rules that constrain policy action. In the United States, policies can be enacted only when both houses of congress and the president reach agreement on a measure. In parliamentary democracies, action may be constrained by the necessity to put together multi-party governing coalitions.Institutional rules 'congeal' preferences (Riker 1980), making it difficult for new policies to enter the political arena.In the past, scholars characterized these systems using comparative statics, a method of analysis that concentrated on equilibrium processes based on the preferences of decisionmakers. (Shepsle and Weingast 1987, Krehbiel 1998). Change was admitted primarily though the replacement of governing parties through elections, which established a new preference-based equilibrium to which the policymaking system quickly adjusted. But comparative statics ignores the on-going information-processing needs of an adaptive system, and political systems are clearly adaptive systems. They dynamically respond to incoming i...

In this article, we examine long-term state budget trends to find evidence of punctuated equilibrium. We use the American states as a broad set of institutional variation with which to examine the nature of policy change through the lens of incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium theories of policymaking. The strength of this article is its sensitivity of variations in policy outcomes across time (18 years), across space (50 state institutions), and across issue space (10 budget categories). This research advances the characterization of policy outcomes by employing a quantitative measure that is both less sensitive to outliers and one that characterizes budget distributions on a simple numeric scale. Our general findings are: (i) state budget categories are interdependent; (ii) state budgets are generally punctuated; but (iii) to varying degrees: Thus, considerable stability (indicated by tall peaks) and punctuations (represented by fat tails) are a central feature of policy outcomes in the American states. This result confirms the logic of punctuated equilibrium theory, but raises future questions about the impact specific variations in institutional costs have on policymaking across the 50 states.

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Political scientists have increasingly focused on causal processes that operate not solely on mean differences but on other stochastic characteristics of the distribution of a dependent variable. This paper surveys important statistical tools used to assess data in situations where the entire distribution of values is of interest. We first outline three broad conditions under which stochastic process methods are applicable and show that these conditions cover many domains of social inquiry. We discuss a variety of visual and analytical techniques, including distributional analysis, direct parameter estimates of probability density functions, and quantile regression. We illustrate the utility of these statistical tools with an application to budgetary data because strong theoretical expectations at the micro- and macrolevel exist about the distributional characteristics for such data. The expository analysis concentrates on three budget series (total, domestic, and defense outlays) of the U.S. government for 1800–2004.

Abstract.A growing body of work has examined the relationship between media and politics from an agenda-setting perspective: Is attention for issues initiated by political elites with the media following suit, or is the reverse relation stronger? A long series of single-country studies has suggested a number of general agenda-setting patterns but these have never been confirmed in a comparative approach. In a comparative, longitudinal design including comparable media and politics evidence for seven European countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), this study highlights a number of generic patterns. Additionally, it shows how the political system matters. Overall, the media are a stronger inspirer of political action in countries with single-party governments compared to those with multiple-party governments for opposition parties. But, government parties are more reactive to media under multiparty governments.

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An indicator of globalization is the growing number of humans crossing national borders. In contrast to explanations for flows of goods and capital, migration research has concentrated on unilateral movements to rich democracies. This focus ignores the bilateral determinants of migration and stymies empirical and theoretical inquiry. The theoretical insights proposed here show how the regime type of both sending and receiving countries influences human migration. Specifically, democratic regimes accommodate fewer immigrants than autocracies and democracies enable emigration while autocracies prevent exit. The mechanisms for this divergence are a function of both micro-level motivations of migrants and institutional constraints on political leaders. Global bilateral migration data and a statistical method that captures the higher-order dependencies in network data are employed in this article.