September 12, 2000
Tadahiro Fujikawa
(So What Question 1) What, if anything,
do politics contribute to successful budgeting?
Public budgeting
essentially involves politics because the budgeting consists of various components
of the politics, such as political actors, social values, institutional
structures. The politics indicates an aggregation of any political activities
and the prescribed procedures of an overall political institution such as
government and congress.
The politics is necessary to make the
budgeting successful. Successful budgeting requires appropriate budgetary
process including management efficiency, careful consideration to budgetary
issues, democratic decision-making and agreements among any participants in the
process. The politics makes much influence on requirements of the budgeting. It
is a cornerstone of successful budgeting in terms of the following
perspectives.
Conflicts
and competition in the process
Budgeting is a
political allocation process where general policy objectives are translated
into specific programs and projects, for accomplishment of social goals on the
assumption of resources limitation. The process consists of four stages, that
is, preparation and submission, approval, execution and audit. It is clear that
there are numerous political activities in every stage. According to Klingner
and Nalbandian, “execution and audit constitute a key relationship between
politics and public administration………The preparation and approval process can
be viewed…… organizationally as the formal set of policies and procedures that
govern the approval process: or informally as a ritualized interaction among
the conflicting expectations of program managers, political executives,
legislators and lobbyists (74).”
There are various political conflicts
and competition in the budgeting. The conflicts and competition essentially
occur not only because all different participants request their political
opinions and priorities in budgetary process, but also because their requests
are sometimes diverse or contradictory. The conflicts and competition are
necessary for budgeting in terms of democratic viewpoint. They are significant
factors to make the budgeting sound and open to all participants, as well as to
make the participants pay attention to public issues seriously before policy
outcomes are accomplished. In this context, politics, which provides the
conflicts and competitions in budgeting, is important for successful budgeting.
Every stage of the budgetary process
presumes the political competition. In the preparation process, interest groups
can politically exercise pressure on public administrators and legislatures for
the proposition or expansion of favorable public policy programs. Department
administrators develop their department’s goals and functional capability to
carry out the programs and specify the limited public resources such as money,
time and people. Chief executives adjust or combine various demands of each department,
and balance their requests in the light of consistency with overall objectives
of each level of government. In this situation, there are a lot of competitions
concerning with policy programs and projects among the participants. The
competitions do not only make public demands explicit, but also make the
particular programs prioritized out of any program alternatives.
In the approval process, legislative
bodies, which authorize budgetary programs, take various competitive topics
into consideration. Values of prior expenditures, testimony of department
heads, opinions of lobbyists and the committee member’s own feelings about the
agency’s programs are, as the critical pending issues, are sometimes different
from each other. This competition prevents the legislative approval decision
about funding and legislation of specific programs from being emotional and
lack of agreement.
In budgetary execution, there are
also competitions among each level of executive branch in terms of job
responsibility for program execution. Also there are sometimes conflicts
between the central budget office and each department in terms of appropriate
financial management strategies. According to Meyers, “department heads often
come to see the budget office as opponent interfering with their vital work”
(32). Auditing, as final function of
budgetary process, which reviews expenditures for compliance with legislative
mandates and prescribed procedures, necessarily includes conflicts between auditing
and the executive branches. These functions of conflict guarantee not only
effectiveness and efficiency of the budgeting, but also rationale of the
program implementation.
Politics contributes to budgeting in terms of conflicts and competition
it provides. Successful budgeting depends on political conflicts and
competitions. Political negotiation and interaction of the participants
required at every stage of budgetary decision-making are accomplished through
the competition. They are prerequisite conditions for successful budgeting.
Successful budgeting is not guaranteed if there are no competitions in the
procedure and the practices.
Budgeting is a system
that requires highly skilled techniques and the professional knowledge of many public
bureaucrats. The system should be inherently established on the purpose of increase
of procedural efficiency and effectiveness. However, the bureaucrats sometimes
tend to maintain the conservative culture where following the existent
technical procedures is preferable to answering the complicated public demands.
This is the so-called conventionalism or incrementalism. Public managers also
have tendency to promote the only growth of their organizations and the staff
numbers by acquisition of more budgets. The bureaucrats sometimes care only
their organizational maintenance and their own priorities regardless of public
interest and political responsibility.
This tendency affects budgeting negatively
because it causes unnecessary budget increase and the lack of the requisite
program examination. In this context, politics, which brings a lot of serious
conflicts and competitions of values and participants into the budgeting, is very
important for successful budgeting. The politics does not only protect
budgeting from the rigid and inflexible bureaucratic approaches, but also slash
away the professionally vested interests of the bureaucrats and their inappropriate
budgetary decision-makings.
Political
environment
Budgeting is open to the
political environment, which is the interaction among fundamental societal
values that often conflict over who is involved in public jobs and how they are
allocated. The environment includes legal restrictions on public policy,
economics, elections, public opinion, and contingencies such as natural disasters,
international relations, technological changes and media involvement.
Politics contributes to the budgeting
in terms of the political environment. The politics affects and molds the
environment, and serious changes in the environment affect the budgeting
accordingly. For example, change of administration sometimes involves change of
old budgetary policy as political argument. Changes in the politics are
significant for successful budgeting because they can not only raise new social
issues, but also articulate various budgetary problems such as budget deficit.
Budgetary
reform
Policy debate of
budgetary reform, such as spending levels, taxing policies, borrowing and
organizational management, is one focus of the politics of budgeting. The reforms
in the conventional budgeting standards according to various social changes are
necessary for successful budgeting. Actually, there have been a lot of political
reforms to deal with several budgetary problems, and to manage budgeting system
effectively and efficiently. For example, Congress established Congressional
Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 as well as Congressional Budget
Office on the purpose of “the resolution of “congressional tardiness in adopting
the budget, impoundment, and piecemeal handling of the budget (Lee, Jr. &
Johnson 257)”.
Role of politics is important for
successful budgeting because the politics raises public budgeting reform.
Particularly, the current politics of budgeting is more important and more difficult
on the condition of limitation of resources and increase of government
expenditures according to the rise of complexity and variety of government’s
involvement in social issues.
Bonser, Charles F. and
McGregor, Jr.,Eugene B and Oster, Jr., Clinton V. “American Public Policy
Problems 2nd edition”. Prentice-Hall, Inc.2000
Klingner, Donald E and
Nalbandian, John. “Public Personnel Management”. Prentice- Hall, Inc. 1998.
Lee, Jr., Robert D and
Johnson, Ronald W. “ Public Budgeting System”. Aspen Publishers, Inc. 1998.
Meyers, Roy T. “Handbook
of Government Budgeting”. Jossey- Bass Publishers Inc, 1999
Rubin, Irene S. “The
Politics of Public Budgeting”. Chatham House Publishers, Inc, 1990.
“The Congressional
Budget Process -- An Explanation”. The United States Senate, Committee on the
Budget.
<
http://www.senate.gov/~budget/republican/reference/cliff_notes/clifftoc.htm>
Collender, Stan. “ The
new politics of the budget process” April 19, 2000.
< http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0400/041900bb.htm>