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...

This article reviews the current state of public policy theory to find out if researchers are ready to readdress the research agenda set by the classic works of Baumgartner and Jones (1993), Kingdon (1984) and Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1993). After reviewing the influences of institutional, rational choice, network, socio-economic and ideational approaches, the article pays tribute to the policy streams, punctuated equilibrium and policy advocacy coalition frameworks whilst also suggesting that future theory and research could identify more precisely the causal mechanisms driving policy change. The article argues that evolutionary theory may usefully uncover the micro-level processes at work, particularly as some the three frameworks refer to dymamic models and methods. After reviewing some evolutionary game theory and the study of memes, the article suggests that the benefits of evolutionary theory in extending policy theories need to be balanced by its limitations.

This paper seeks to reconstruct and revitalize the famous Hirschman framework by providing a comprehensive review of the current use of 'exit, voice and loyalty'. We begin by critically examining Hirchman's original account, and then look at the way his argument has been extended in different fields both conceptually and empirically. We suggest that while advances have been made, the results so far are somewhat disappointing given the perceptiveness of the original insight. We believe this is because his apparently simple schema is more complex than it first appears, and different aspects of exit, of voice, and of empirical foundations of loyalty need to be analytically distinguished in order to produce testable empirical hypotheses about their relationships.

This paper reviews two contrasting approaches governments use to engage the citizen to promote better public policy outcomes: nudging citizens using the insights of behavioural economics, as summarised by Thaler and Sunstein (2009) or giving citizens the space to think through and debate solutions, as indicated by proponents of deliberative democracy. The paper summarises each approach, giving examples; then it compares and contrast them, illustrating their relative strengths and weaknesses. The paper concludes by suggesting that the approaches share some common features and policy‐makers could useful draw upon both.

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The distribution of attention across issues is of fundamental importance to the political agenda and outputs of government. This article presents an issue-based theory of the diversity of governing agendas where the core functions of government—defense, international affairs, the economy, government operations, and the rule of law—are prioritized ahead of all other issues. It undertakes comparative analysis of issue diversity of the executive agenda of several European countries and the United States over the postwar period. The results offer strong evidence of the limiting effect of core issues—the economy, government operations, defense, and international affairs—on agenda diversity. This suggests not only that some issues receive more attention than others but also that some issues are attended to only at times when the agenda is more diverse. When core functions of government are high on the agenda, executives pursue a less diverse agenda—focusing the majority of their attention on fewer issues. Some issues are more equal than others in executive agenda setting.

Publishing performance information about local public services, an increasing trend in many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, matters politically because it has an effect on incumbent local governments' electoral support. Voters are able to use performance information to punish or reward incumbents in the elections that follow their publication, which may fill a gap in the chain of accountability between voters and governments. We model the introduction of published Comprehensive Performance Assessments of local authorities in England, which make summary information about performance available to voters, as a ''shock'' to the relationship between voters and incumbents. Controlling for an unpublicized measure of performance change over time, change in the local tax level, change in local economic conditions, and whether the local incumbent is the party of the incumbent government at the national level, we find negativity bias. Incumbents in local authorities in the ''poor'' performance category experience a substantial reduction in aggregate vote share at the election following publication, but there is no similarly sized reward for those in the highest performance category.This article examines the political consequences of the publication of information about the performance of local public services, focusing on change in electoral support for incumbent local governments. The topic is important because much of the effective practice of a democracy depends on the existence of a link between the citizens and decisions taken by public bureaucracies in their name (Jones and McDermott 2004;Key 1966;Ranney 1954). If citizens attempt to update their views of an incumbent government with information about how well it is running the services and activities under its control, they need accurate information to make judgments about the agents who are supposed to be doing their bidding. Policy makers in many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries have made considerable investment in performance measurement systems in

The link between government performance and support for incumbents is a key mechanism of accountable government. We model the vote share of incumbent administrations in local government as proportional and nonproportional responses to public service performance. We evaluate the models using a panel data set covering performance and elections from 2001 to 2007 in English local governments where an incumbent party or coalition was up for reelection. We control for the previous vote, whether the incumbent administration is of the national governing party, and local economic conditions. We find evidence for a nonproportional, performance threshold hypothesis, which implies that voters' behavior is affected by clear gradations of performance. Only the difference between low performance and at least mediocre performance matters. There is no reward for high performance. Instead our findings suggest negativity bias in the relationship between performance and electoral support for incumbents.