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Awarded for best dissertation in the field of policy studies.

Award Committee: Robert F. Rich, Chair, University of Illinois; Hank C. Jenkins-Smith, University of Oklahoma; Anne Schneider, Arizona State University

Recipient: Christian Breunig, University of Washington

Dissertation Title: “Institutions, Attention Shifts, and Changes within National Budgets"

Dissertation Chair: Bryan Jones, University of Washington

Citation: This dissertation represents impressive state-of-the art empirical work with a strong qualitative component, consisting of interviews with budgetary officials in Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom.  The study systematically compares budgetary policy-making in four western democracies, Breunig subjects three separate public policy theories to rigorous test: the policy process approach from American politics, the party control model from the study of parliamentary democracies an the “veto group model”.  The results demonstrate that the policy process model represents the best fit for explaining budgetary policy-making.  In effect, the institutional costs incurred in the budgetary system are better at explaining the stochastic distribution of outcomes than are the more political outcomes. 

Underlying this study is an ambitious attempt to unify theories of comparative politics and policy process theories used to study American politics   Most European work on policy processes is qualitative, and this is an exceptional piece of work in its successful attempt to unify this work with more quantitative American political process studies.  Breunig’s approach is an extension of stochastic process methods used to study budget changes by Bryan Jones and others.  The approach makes a major contribution in addressing a short-coming in the study of political decision-making: the limitations of the incrementalist approach in which decision-makers made only small steps from the status quo because of the role of uncertainty in the process.

This is an exceptional piece of work which makes contributions to the study of public policy processes generally and to issues of comparative politics, and it does so in a theoretically and statistically innovative manner.