Changing Leaders and Changing Policies
The Impact of Elite Succession on Budgetary Priorities in Democratic Countries
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6229482 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Valerie Bunce (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1980 |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 373 |
| Publication date | 1980-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Journal of Political Science (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0092-5853 • E-ISSN: 1540-5907 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2110824 |
| OpenAlex | W2332147107 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 15 |
| References cited | 7 |
Leadership succession is a topic of immediate concern for political scientists and laypeople alike. However, most scholarly studies of elections have analyzed the process as a dependent variable. This paper takes up where these studies of leadership change have left off, by assessing the policy impact of leadership changeover in democratic polities. My guiding concern, then, is not rules, but whether who rules matters in terms of government policy. I assessed the impact of electoral succession by examining how changes in the top leadership of seven advanced industrial democracies affected their budgetary allocations from approximately 1950 to 1976. The guiding hypothesis was that elections do not disturb the essentially linear and incremental nature of budgetary change in democratic states. This hypothesis, however, was not upheld by the analysis; the impact of succession was strong and pervasive across time and across nations. Thus, succession was found to be an important political variable that operates as a mechanism of policy change in democratic states
Changeover · Democracy · Ecological succession · Economics · Elite · Government (linguistics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Fiscal Policies and Political Economy · Law · Local Government Finance and Decentralization · Public Administration
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| Unique citing works | 15 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,35 |
| Citation span | 1983 - 2025 (43) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 14 |