Agency Requests, Gubernatorial Support and Budget Success in State Legislatures

This is a study of the budget success of state administrative agencies. Although a number of recent studies provide valuable information about environmental influences on state and local government expenditures, relatively little is known about the factors that affect the budgets of individual administrative units. Existing studies typically focus on the state as the unit of analysis, and report findings about the correlates of state (or state plus local) government expenditures in total and by the major fields of education, highways, public welfare, health, hospitals et al. The United States Bureau of the Census provides an invaluable service for this scholarship by collecting state and local government data and ordering it into categories that permit state-to-state comparisons. When political scientists and economists rely exclusively on Census Bureau publications, however, they preclude an attack on certain aspects of the expenditure process. In order to report data by the comparable fields of education, highways, public welfare etc., the Bureau of the Census rearranges the expenditures made by individual state agencies. As a result we know little about the factors that affect the budgets of individual agencies. And because it is the agency's budget that is the focus of budget-making, we have no systematic information about many of the influences that might affect government expenditures. Chief among the unknowns are the influence of each agency's budget request in the expenditure process, and the support given to the agencies by the governor.