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Punctuated equilibrium in democracy and autocracy: an analysis of Hungarian budgeting between 1868 and 2013

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2018

Miklós Sebők Open the ORCID record for Miklós Sebők [Opens in a new window]  and
Tamás Berki
Miklós Sebők*
Affiliation:
Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
Tamás Berki
Affiliation:
Magyar Nemzeti Bank (National Bank of Hungary, Budapest, Hungary)
*
*E-mail: sebok.miklos@tk.mta.hu
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Abstract

The article investigates the dynamics of budgeting and its explanatory factors in Hungary based on a new database. Previous work for the period between 1991 and 2013 demonstrated that year-on-year changes in budgetary allocations by policy topics show a leptokurtic distribution. This distribution of policy changes is generally associated with the notion of punctuated equilibrium. We extend this analysis to cover over 155 years of Hungarian budgetary history. Our investigation of a database of 2580 spending category observations (covering the period between 1868 and 2013) lends support for the theory of punctuated equilibrium. We also analysed the impact of political regimes on budgetary dynamics. Here we provided empirical evidence for the validity of the informational advantage hypothesis which states that democracies will show lower level of kurtosis than other political regimes. This finding is also in line with the results of available comparative studies.

Keywords

political regimesbudgetingpolicy agendasHungarypunctuated equilibrium
Type
Research Article
Information
European Political Science Review , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , November 2018 , pp. 589 - 611
Copyright
© European Consortium for Political Research 2018 

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