Recent studies on policy changes have shown that there are limitations of incrementalism and that there no longer exists a general theory that can explain policy change. A number of studies have been conducted to examine policy changes in terms of dra...
Recent studies on policy changes have shown that there are limitations of incrementalism and that there no longer exists a general theory that can explain policy change. A number of studies have been conducted to examine policy changes in terms of drastic changes in budgets or policy agenda.
According to the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET), policy change is punctuated by long periods of stability, and large, but rare, changes due to shifts in society or the government. Although the reasons for these drastic changes are interpreted mainly from external events, the exact mechanisms of these changes are still not known.
In this study, we assume that the punctuated budget changes are a result of not only external events but also the internal characteristics of government departments. We attempt to identify the regularity of budget change pattern due to these internal characteristics.
We classified government departments under different heads according to traditional policies or organization types, such as the bureau-shaping model, Lowi’s model, etc.
In order to understand budget changes caused by external events, the ARIMA-Intervention analysis was implemented. The results showed that the ARIMA-Intervention analysis explained the abrupt change in budget well. This means that a change in budget cannot be explained as incrementalism.
However, interventions are not consistent but vary according to department, which means that the pattern of these changes is due to reasons other than the internal characteristics of government departments. In order to find the internal characteristics of budget changes, we analyzed the budget change kurtosis of government department along with various policy and organization types. Normally, a high kurtosis means there is a high probability of a punctuated equilibrium.
The results show that productive agencies, delivery agencies, and transfer agencies have a relatively high kurtosis. The kurtosis for distribution and redistribution policy agencies is higher than that of agencies for regulation, foreign affairs, and defense policies.
From this study, in order to generalize the characteristics of kurtosis, we introduced the concept of the bureaucratic power that agencies have and followed the trend of kurtosis with a bureaucratic power index. The results show that the kurtosis increases as the bureaucratic power index decreases, which implies that bureaucratic power is inversely proportional to kurtosis.
The results from this study are expected to contribute toward the efforts to discover the long-term evolution of the budget change algorithm based on non-linear points of view.