Public Sector Governance and Accountability Series: Budgeting and ...

112 Alta Fölscher
“satisficing.”Instead of evolving budgeting practices that meet these problems
head on to produce the best possible outcomes, budget decision makers
satisfice—that is, they satisfy and suffice. Instead of maximizing, the strategy
is to behave in ways that allow the system to get by, come out all right,
and avoid the worst. Incremental line-item budgeting practices offer wellestablished
methods for satisficing within a time-delimited budget process.
Incremental Line-Item Budgeting
In the third edition of their seminal work, The New Politics of the Budgetary
Process, Wildavsky and Caiden (1997) describe a traditional system of budgeting,
which they dub classical budgeting. The main identifying characteristic
of this system is incrementalism.
Wildavsky and Caiden argue that budgeting systems revert to incrementalism
because budgeting is complex, with many interrelated items, and
because technical difficulties arise when choosing between competing
options. As Wildavsky and Caiden (1997: 45) put it, “Endless time and
unlimited ability to calculate may help. But time is in short supply, the
human mind can only encompass just so much, and the number of budgetary
items may be huge.”The programs to which funds are allocated and their
associated outputs in the real world—for example, roads, teaching hours,
serviced hospital beds—have different values for different people. There is
no objective method of judging priorities among different programs.
The limited period of time within which budget decision makers prepare
and examine a subsequent year’s budget does not allow them to examine
whether each stream of recurrent spending is justified or to consider all
alternative uses for the funds. Besides, such a process would need to include
in the calculations future funds already spoken for on account of contractual
or quasi-contractual commitments that were made in previous years
and that span years. The base of spending is therefore taken almost as a
given, and the focus of the budget process is on making marginal changes to
this base, albeit on making new spending proposals, bidding for new funds,
or decreasing spending in various ways. Working with a given base enables
management of the calculations and resolution of conflicts within the
budget preparation time frame.
The most significant determining factors of a new year’s budget are all
previous budgets. Many items are rolled over from year to year as a standard.
Once programs are judged to be satisfactory, they become part of the budgeting
base and are rarely challenged. Because programs are usually associated
with internal and external interest groups—for example, officials employed