Otto A. Davis

A Theory of the Budgetary Process

There are striking regularities in the budgetary process. The evidence from over half of the non-defense agencies indicates that the behavior of the budgetary process of the United States government results in aggregate decisions similar to those produced by a set of simple decision rules that are linear and temporally stable. For the agencies considered, certain equations are specified and compared with data composed of agency requests (through the Bureau of the Budget) and Congressional appropriations from 1947 through 1963. The comparison indicates that these equations summarize accurately aggregate outcomes of the budgetary process for each agency.In the first section of the paper we present an analytic summary of the federal budgetary process, and we explain why basic features of the process lead us to believe that it can be represented by simple models which are stable over periods of time, linear, and stochastic. In the second section we propose and discuss the alternative specifications for the agency-Budget Bureau and Congressional decision equations. The empirical results are presented in section three. In section four we provide evidence on deviant cases, discuss predictions, and future work to explore some of the problems indicated by this kind of analysis. An appendix contains informal definitions and a discussion of the statistical terminology used in the paper.

SOCIAL PREFERENCE ORDERINGS AND MAJORITY RULE

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Towards A Predictive Theory of Government Expenditure: Us Domestic Appropriations

The project on which this paper reports is aimed not only at increased understanding of the United States federal budget process, but also at predicting government expenditures in total and by bureau with a view to their determination within United States national econometric models. Estimates of likely expenditures using standard econometric techniques are poor, both in absolute terms and in comparison with our own work. Management of the economy should be improved by the use of predictors based on considering budgeting as a political process that is responsive to economic and social conditions. Use of mathematical models in the social sciences should be furthered, not by arguing their hypothetical utility, but by demonstrating that they work. The proof is in the prediction.

The Two Freedoms, Economic Growth and Development: An Empirical Study

Log-linear methods are applied to categorical data containing economic freedom, political freedom, the level of income, and the rate of economic growth for a panel of about 100 countries from 1975 to 1992. The main results are: given economic freedom, the rate of economic growth is independent of political freedom and the level of income; given the level of income, political freedom is independent of economic freedom and the growth rate. The analysis suggests the fundamental effects of economic freedom in fostering economic growth, and a high level of income as the condition of a high degree of political freedom.

On the power and importance of the mean preference in a mathematical model of democratic choice

The aggregation of individual preferences into a social preference ordering is one of the most fundamental of the problems in social science. The general problem is non-trivial even for a small group of individuals. Given plausible conditions which a social preference ordering should satsify, Arrow demonstrates in his classic work [1] that even when individual preferences satisfy reasonable conditions there need not exist a general social welfare function or preference ordering if the number of involved persons and alternatives under consideration is greater than or equal to three. Only in the special case of two alternatives is the device of decision by majority rule proven to provide a generally satisfactory social preference ordering for an arbitrary number of individuals.

The Cultural Context of American Education

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the cultural context of American education. it describes the most basic and cherished roots of the American culture and the inaction is simply due to a fear of change—a fear of what will happen if minorities are given an equal place. The educational process is inseparable from Americas cultural roots. The exogenous variables having the most influence on achievement were ethnic group affiliation, region of the country, certain of the individual demographic characteristics, and many of the school and teacher characteristics. The surprising discovery of analysis was the indication that good teachers and good schools are important for educational achievement—a finding contrary to previous analyses of the same data. The education process produces students with a certain amount of knowledge, motivation, set of expectations about the future, and sense of individual efficacy. In addition, this process forms, in the pupils mind, a perception of teachers and parents expectations. An individuals expectations for the future can affect and be affected by certain factors. As one conceptualize the education process as one with multiple outputs with feedback between the outputs, one employs simultaneous equations estimation procedures for modeling the process where the multiple outputs constitute the set of endogenous variables.

18 – Behavioral Simulation as a Tool for the Analysis of Policy Problems*

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses behavioral simulation as a tool for the analysis of policy problems. The major goal of behavioral simulation is to determine the process by which individuals, groups, or organizations solve problems or make decisions. Because of the emphasis on process, the entire effort is sometimes called process modeling. As a technique for modeling the behavior of individuals, organizations, or even systems, simulation permits the analysis of different stages of decision making and problem solving and their interaction, (2) the examination of decision criteria and priorities including the conditions under which these may or may not be operable, and (3) the identification of relative weights or rankings associated with decision variables. The flow chart is generally the major tool employed to determine the appropriate process. It is a powerful organizational device that allows the researcher to break task into components. The flow chart forces the researcher to be specific and to attend to detail. It is also important because it is generally the intermediate step between the observation of the process and the final reduction of that process to a computer program. Behavioral simulation is only beginning to be used for the purpose of analyzing public policy problems. The traditional objective of such a simulation was simply to replicate the process of problem solving or decision making and, thus, to contribute to a better understanding of the behavior under consideration.

The Importance of the Middle in Spatial Politics

Since Hotelling (1929), almost as an after-thought in a paper on the location of economic activity, observed that there was a reason why winning Democrats and Republicans tended to favor each other, there has been a recognition of the importance of the middle in political competition. It remained for Black (1948, Black 1958) and Downs (1957) to develop single dimensional models of spatial politics and to observe that the median constituted a dominant strategy for a candidate or party to prevail in an election in which there are only two contenders.