Partisan Politics and the Budgetary Process in Oslo

Abstract

Two alternative models of political effects on budgetary decisions are set out: the party programmatic model and the alliance structure model. Multiple regression tests of the validity of each model are conducted with reference to systematic interview/questionnaire responses from agency officials in the municipal government of Oslo, Norway. Support from various political parties and alliance structures is shown to have substantial effects on agency budget success at each level in the budgetary considerations. Results from submission of the data to multidimensional scaling routines suggest (1) the dimensions along which political parties divide in terms of agency supportiveness during the budgetary proceedings and (2) the dimensions which divide various alliance elements with regard to agency supportiveness. Patterns of public expenditure in Western democratic societies often appear markedly deterministic. As decisional complexities abound, the incremental style holds sway, with marginal percentage increases granted year after year. As financial stress proliferates in the form of limited revenues, decisional options are restrained and choices are limited by factors over which decisionmakers have no direct control. If, indeed, the nexus between the distribution of public goods and the centrality of partisan politics is weakening, then those democratic theorists, inclined toward the modification of normative theory on the basis of empirical evidence, have a dialectical song and dance routine of monumental proportions before them. Normative democratic theorists have never treated the problem of budget