Public Appeals as a Budgetary Weapon

Abstract

ABSTRACT Public appeals improve presidential success in budgeting and lawmaking, but the evidence remains scarce at the state level. This study tests the influence of public appeals on gubernatorial success in the budgeting process. It posits that chief executives who choose to appeal to the public will be able to put additional pressure on the lawmakers and reduce the chances of their proposals being cut. The proposition is tested in a longitudinal study of all states from 2007 to 2019. Public discussions of budget proposals are extracted from gubernatorial speeches using computational text analysis. The findings provide strong support for the main hypothesis, which holds across different econometric specifications and operationalizations of success. This study complements the traditional view of state budgeting as a process of bargaining and negotiations between the executive and legislative branches and indicates that public involvement may have a systematic influence on the outcome.