The Roles of Participants in the Budgetary Process

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss the propositions put forward by Aaron Wildavsky that spending departments within a public organization try to expand their budgets for better services, while the policy making committee tries to guard against budgetary expansion, giving the standard reasoning that there are insufficient public funds available to allocate towards all of the requested departmental budgets. The principal contribution of this article has been to further explore participants’ roles in the budget process. The pre-existing literature on this topic suggest that department heads do act as advocates for their departments and that policy committee does act as the guardian. To overcome the conflict between advocates and guardian, the heuristics of incremental theory such as fairness and precedent need to be used.

Keywords: Budgetary Process, Role Analysis, Governmental Budgeting, Budget Planning.