Budgeting, Policy, Politics

Appreciation of Aaron Wildavsky

Naomi Caiden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000674903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Öffentliche Finanzen

Aaron Wildavsky was one of the most innovative and prolific scholars in the field of budgeting in our time. His work spanned a period of more than forty years, and its perspectives encompassed not only budgeting in the United States, but also its comparative and historical dimensions. As a leading political scientist, his research also ranged into American political institutions, public policy analysis, leadership, and biblical studies. This book pays tribute to Aaron Wildavsky by explicating his life and work, with emphasis on his contributions to the field of public budgeting and finance.Larry Jones and Jerry McCaffery place Wildavsky's work within the context of previous work on budgeting. They show how some of the highlights of his immense output responded to and shaped questions in the field. Naomi Caiden reviews the way in which Wildavsky used budgeting as a window into other areas of politics. Richard Rose discusses how an American scholar became an internationally known one. Joseph White goes back to the beginning of Aaron's career and shows that budgeting in agencies and in Congress is still incremental for very powerful reasons. Allen Schick reviews the history of the federal budget process, brilliantly summarizing how much has changed.The festschrift poignantly assesses the significance and influence of Aaron Wildavsky's work. It also includes some excerpts from Wildavsky's own writings in this area, and experiences of those who collaborated with him. In acknowledging Wildavsky's contributions to public budgeting and political science, this book also makes an original contribution to the field. It will be a necessary addition to the libraries of political scientists, economists, policymakers, not to mention all those who admired Aaron Wildavsky and his work.

1
From the Writings of Aaron Wildavsky¹

The reasons for studying budgeting (or the expenditure process, as it is sometimes called) are many. It exists. The people involved in it care about what they do. Their actions are important to many others in or out of government. The bonds between budgeting and “politiking” are intimate. Realistic budgets are an expression of practical politics. The allocation of resources necessarily reflects the distribution of power. Budgeting is so basic it must reveal the norms by which men live in a particular political culture—for it is through the choices inherent in limited resources that consensus is established and conflict is generated. The authority of government is made manifest by its ability not only to make a budget but also to make it stick. Public policymaking in action—which programs to benefit whom will be established or maintained at what levels of support?—is epitomized through the budget. So is implementation; for, when push comes to shove, programs will not be carried out as intended (or at all) unless commitment is memoralized by money. If justice delayed is justice denied, a budget rejected is a program aborted, a fund diverted is a policy perverted. When a process involves power, authority, culture, consensus, and conflict, it captures a great deal of national political life.

Aaron Wildavsky, Budgeting (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975), pp. XII-XIII.

Having begun with modest expectations (politics discourages heroics) I have not been disillusioned by the difficulty of finding programs that work well. There was little reason to believe that speaking truth to power (if only we had either!) would be more successful now than in the past. Problem-solving may, however, give way to problem succession (cut one off and another sprouts). Instead of attending only to trouble (how far have we fallen short?), I have learned also to ask whether our current difficulties are better or worse for people than the ones we used to have. On this score, as I will try to show, modest optimism is justified. It is no mean accomplishment that the federal government has put its money where its mouth is by increasing both absolutely and proportionately the amounts devoted to social-welfare programs. It helps to learn what government is worse at doing (changing citizens’ behavior) and what it is better at doing (moving money). Then we would be less surprised that citizens are better able to get government to change what it does than they are at getting government to change the way their fellow citizens behave.

Aaron Wildavsky, Speaking Truth to Power (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), pp. 1–2.

What could be rationally wrong with collectively considering where we want to go and what might be the best way of getting there? So much is wrong it is hard to know where to begin. The question itself is confusing. Does destination know no limitation? Do we first decide where and then how? This priority is perverse; it is no better than the reverse, as if the journey always mattered more than the destination. No, where one wishes to go depends on whether one is able to get there. Life is larger than our categories. When my grandfather lost the family fortune, comprised of fifty rubles, he went to see the local miracle Rabbi, Joseph of Slutsk, who consulted mystical works, and told him to collect ten kopecs apiece from his friends and relatives and take it to the train. “But where shall I go?” Grandpa cried. “As far as your money will take you,” replied the Rabbi, who knew more about the relationship of resources to objectives than his seemingly scientific successors.

Speaking Truth to Power, p. 9.

My preference for interaction rather than cogitation, for more “asking” and less “telling,” for politics over planning, is not meant to protect interaction from scrutiny as if it were a dogma. On the contrary, skepticism should extend especially to interaction—how it develops, what sustains it, why it produces outcomes, its class and ideological biases, when it should be changed—precisely because we begin by intending to rely on it. In a word, the main task of responsible intellectual cogitation is to monitor, appraise, modify, and otherwise strengthen social interaction.…

Whatever the combination, speaking truth to power remains the ideal of analysts who hope they have truth, but realize they have not (and, in a democracy, should not have) power. No one can do analysis without becoming aware that moral considerations are integral to the enterprise. After all, analysis is about what ought to be done, about making things better, not worse. I have never been sympathetic to the view that facts and values, except as intellectual constructs, either are or ought to be kept separate in action.

Speaking Truth to Power, pp. 12–13.

Policies should be considered not as eternal truths but as hypotheses subject to modification and replacement by better ones until these in turn are discarded. Dogma is deleterious; skepticism is sound. Yet dogma is indispensable; without taking some things for granted some of the time, everything is in flux so that nothing comes amenable to examination. Drawing the balance is not easy: how much dogma versus how much skepticism?

Speaking Truth to Power, p. 16.

These, then, are the tasks and tensions of policy analysis: relating resources to objectives by balancing social interaction against intellectual cogitation so as to learn to draw the line between skepticism and dogma.

My life is spent reading, talking, and writing about public affairs. Yet I cannot keep up. And, though I have more time than most people, I cannot satisfy the endless demands for participation. Somehow we must be able to make sense out of public affairs without being consumed by them. How to help ourselves gain access to public life without becoming politicians is the challenge, for it means not only sporadic influence over policy but continuous participation as part of policy.

Speaking Truth to Power, p. 19.

Note

1 Quoted with permission of Mary Wildavsky.

2
Budgeting According to Wildavsky: A Bibliographic Essay

L. R. JONES AND JERRY McCAFFERY

The crucial aspect of budgeting is whose preferences are to prevail in disputes about which activities are to be carried on and to what degree, in light of limited resources… who shall receive budgetary benefits and how much?

Aaron Wildavsky
“Political Implications of Budgetary Reform,” 1961

Aaron Wildavsky had an amazingly broad set of interests in social science and public policy as indicated in other articles in this symposium. A perusal of a recent curriculum vita reveals that he wrote or coauthored thirty books with several forthcoming, 186 articles and book chapters at latest count, and some additional papers awaiting publication. The topics covered in this vast oeuvre of books and articles, in unpublished casual papers, and in newspaper and magazine articles too numerous to count, reveal the incredible spectrum of his curiosity and knowledge. His work encompasses budgeting and fiscal policy (domestic and international), political culture, community power and leadership, risk analysis and safety, environmental policy, the American presidency, presidential elections, American diplomacy, U.S. oil and gas policy, the art and craft of policy analysis, policy implementation, how to conduct research, how to read and write, academic collaboration, development and evolution of the social sciences, political and religious philosophy, Moses and Joseph as leaders and administrators, the politics of religion, the experience of his father as a youth in Poland, academic leadership and administration, communism and morality, the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, and more … much more. To say that Aaron was a profound thinker and prolific writer runs the risk of understatement.

Of this large body of material, Wildavsky wrote and coauthored nine books and forty articles and book chapters on budgeting and fiscal policy. It is this work that is reviewed selectively here. A bibliography of Wildavsky’s work on budgeting and fiscal policy is provided at the conclusion of this essay. Any attempt to survey the totality of Aaron’s writing would surely require an entire book rather than one chapter. Furthermore, we have focused our review on approximately a dozen of the forty-eight pieces within the Wildavsky portfolio on budgeting, taxing, and spending—concentrating on those pieces in which he and his collaborators, in our view, made the most significant contribution to knowledge in the field. Our selection is, of course, subjective, and we yield in advance to criticism that we have not included all that should be covered or that we may have misinterpreted the significance of some of the material that we include. Inevitably, every student of budgeting and of Wildavsky is entitled to select his or her own list of greatest works and to interpolate them in other ways and from other perspectives.

Initially, one is humbled both by the volume and breadth of Wildavsky’s contribution. A deeper reading reinforces this impression and enables the reader to delineate the themes that Aaron and his collaborators worked on creatively for over three decades. To discover this continuity is not to say that he and his coworkers did not find anything new over this time. The opposite is the case; Aaron was perpetually curious and driven to investigate and understand every new twist and turn of budgetary process and politics. In fact, he was the quintessential student of budgetary politics, and his quest to understand and interpret appeared only to be near an end less than one year before his death when he mentioned to colleagues that he had written everything he cared to say about budgeting. Of course, he said essentially the same thing in his book Budgeting: A Comparative Theory of Budgetary Processes published in 1975.¹

Wildavsky is best known in public administration as the author of The Politics of the Budgetary Process, his enduring treatise on budgetary procedure, culture, strategy, competition, and power. As we explain subsequently, rereading this book reveals how cleverly Wildavsky interpreted congressional and executive behavior, how clearly he wrote about strategy and power politics, and how writing this book was a logical follow-on to the works that put Aaron “on the map,” so to speak, as a very promising young political scientist—his book Dixon-Yates: A Study of Power Politics (1962) and the article “TVA and Power Politics,” which appeared in the American Political Science Review in 1961. Readers in political science and public administration were initially exposed to Wildavsky’s analysis of budgeting in, “Political Implications of Budgetary Reform,” also published in 1961.²

About The Politics of the Budgetary Process, Dwight Waldo once remarked, “Everyone [in political science and American government] knew about this stuff, but he sat down and wrote it all out. It was amazing how much of it he captured, and none of us thought the book would receive the kind of notice it did or that it would last as long as it has.”³ Aaron conceded as much in his dedication in The New Politics of the Budgetary Process’. “… The Politics of the Budgetary Process … did a lot more for me than I did for it.”⁴

Despite his assertive public demeanor and public speaking style, Aaron was personally rather humble. This, we guess, may be explained in part as a result of his early experiences in life, born and raised in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, the son of a politically active, Yiddish- and English-speaking Ukrainian immigrant father and Latvian-Ukrainian mother. He went to Brooklyn College because, “I was never told that [it] was a vulgar, proletarian backwater… So I encountered a succession of brilliant teachers.”⁵ His humility also may have resulted from the fact that as he grew older, he understood more fully how much must be learned about political culture and public policy before one can become an expert critic and how much time it takes to accumulate what noted sociologist Martin Trow, a former colleague of Aaron’s in the School of Public Policy at Berkeley, has termed “deep knowledge.”⁶ Let us now turn to an analysis of the themes and messages woven through his writings to see what deep knowledge is rendered in some of his seminal works. We begin with his first article on budgeting and then proceed roughly in chronological order, with emphasis on what readers in the field of public budgeting consider his two most important books, The Politics of the Budgetary Process and The New Politics of the Budgetary Process.

ORIGINS OF WILDAYSKY’S BUDGETARY ODYSSEY

As an ambitious young Oberlin professor, Aaron established the agenda for his future research on budgeting in “Political Implications of Budgetary Reform.” In retrospect, this article reveals the outlines of many of the major themes that were to emerge in The Politics of the Budgetary Process and in his subsequent writings. Students in Aaron’s budgetary politics course in the Department of Political Science at Berkeley in the late 1960s (and presumably later) lear...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• FOREWORD: AARON WILDAVSKY
• AN OVERVIEW
• 1. FROM THE WRITINGS OF AARON WILDAVSKY
• 2. BUDGETING ACCORDING TO WILDAVSKY: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY
• 3. BUDGETING IN HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
• 4. NATURALISTIC INQUIRY IN WASHINGTON AND WHITEHALL
• 5. AARON WILDAVSKY: EIN MENSCH FÜR DIE GANZE WELT
• 6. WORKING WITH AARON WILDAVSKY: EDITED TRANSCRIPTION OF A ROUND TABLE IN REMEMBRANCE OF AARON WILDAVSKY, OCTOBER 15, 1993
• 7. DEFICITS AND THE ECONOMY: THE CASE OF THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION AND INTEREST RATES
• 8. (ALMOST) NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN: WHY THE WORK OF BUDGETING REMAINS INCREMENTAL
• 9. FROM THE OLD POLITICS OF BUDGETING TO THE NEW
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS