How budgets change: punctuations, trends, and super-trends

Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) describes policy change as occurring mostly through incremental movements with infrequent periods of dramatic change. An impressive body of empirical literature relating to budgeting supports this view, but virtually all empirical tests have focused on examining distributions of annual changes, thus nullifying chronology. In this article, we focus on the time element. Using the same databases as previously used in canonical PET studies, we explore multi-year trends, not only annual observations. For our analyses, we identify directional series of changes (while allowing for one-year changes in direction if these are immediately offset in the following year) on a U.S. budget distribution dataset covering the period of 1947 through 2014, with 60 categories of spending consistently defined over time and adjusted for inflation. We then assess the robustness of the PET findings when incorporating a longer time units of trending series of annual changes into the analysis. We find that almost 65% of changes occur in series of 4 years or more. Nonetheless, the signature PET literature pattern of high kurtosis is equally present in these series as well as in shorter series. Moreover, within growing and trending series, we find that 21% of these series generate 80% of positive budget change. Within these series, we identify a small group of “super-trends” that account for a large share of the overall change. We conclude that expanding methodologies for the study of budgetary change to incorporate longer-term dynamics helps to better understand policy change, but such findings remain consistent with the PET perspective.