7 - Conclusion: The Budgetary Mix

Summary

In Chapter 7, we conclude by placing both our theoretical and methodological contributions within the wider world of government decision-making. Our theory begins with the core assumption that government ideology drives the budgetary priorities of governments. With a blank slate, these ideological preferences would steer governments in shaping budgets. While this is a useful place to start theoretical debate about political budgeting, an important part of our argument is about how contextual factors influence whether governments can achieve their ideological priorities. Throughout the book, we find many instances in which context overwhelms ideology to drive government budgets. In developing our theoretical ideas about the interplay between ideology and contexts, we emphasize the importance of recognizing the interlinked nature of the different parts of political budgets. We take advantage of recent advances in dynamic compositional models and panel vector autoregressive (pVAR) models when testing our ideas. To make the results from these complex models accessible, we rely heavily on graphical presentations of our findings. Together, our theory of budgets and the methods we use to test it are all intended to bring studies closer to the messy but fascinating real world of political budgeting.