How the spending patterns of cities change: Budgetary incrementalism reexamined

Do city governments generally behave in keeping with the assumptions underlying the incremental model when they allocate their resources among competing activities? That is to say, do they try to maintain everyone's historical “fair share” of the budget in order to minimize disputes among rival participants in the decision process? Earlier studies have lacked sufficient data to address this question. However, with data from 105 West German cities, the present study is able to provide an answer. The resource allocation behavior of many of those cities seems to conform with the incremental model's assumptions. Yet for other cities, major changes in expenditure patterns from one year to the next are common. The differences in the variability of expenditure patterns across the cities studied are far from random. They are systematically associated with certain characteristics of the municipal environment. These associations, in turn, offer plausible hints about the process that leads to change in cities' spending patterns.