EU budgetary dynamics

Incremental or Punctuated Equilibrium

Bibliographic Data

ID6288941
AuthorsManuele Citi (0000-0002-1926-6082, Copenhagen Business School, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume20
Issue8
Pages1157-1173
Publication date2013-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of European Public Policy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1350-1763 • E-ISSN: 1466-4429
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13501763.2012.760333
OpenAlexW2031377664
LanguageEN
Citations received23
References cited24

In this article I study the long-term evolution of the main categories of expenditure of the European Union (EU) budget (1984–2011). The aim is to assess the extent to which the EU is affected by a structural form of policy inertia, and to investigate the general pattern of policy stability and change in the EU in light of the two models of policy dynamics currently existing in the literature: the incrementalist model and the punctuated equilibrium model. The analysis of long series of original data extracted from the EU budget shows that EU policies do not evolve following an incrementalist pattern, but by a punctuated equilibrium dynamic. Keywords: EU budgetincrementalismpolicy dynamicspunctuated equilibrium ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Susana Borrás, Adrienne Héritier, Frank Baumgartner and two anonymous referees for a number of valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. All mistakes remain my own responsibility. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Danish Council for Independent Research – Social Sciences (FSE) grant no. 10-092456/FSE. Notes The study of policy dynamics remains underdeveloped in Europe. The only exceptions are a small number of studies on the budgetary dynamics of specific European countries (Baumgartner et al. Citation2006; Breunig Citation2006; Green-Pedersen and Wilkerson Citation2006; John Citation2006; Walgrave et al. Citation2006); and an insightful study on the dynamics of agenda-setting in the EU (Princen Citation2009). All the European case studies are collected in the special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy on the 'Comparative Studies of Policy Agendas', Volume 13, Issue 7, September 2006. More precisely, the European Commission is involved in the initial part of the process, with the preliminary draft of the budget. The budgetary authority has formally only two branches: the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers. However, the European Commission can influence the whole budgeting process through the so-called 'trialogue' mechanism. Before the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, the cross-vetoing could happen because the Council of Ministers can turn down the Parliament's amendments on the compulsory expenditure, whereas the Parliament can turn down the Council's amendments on the non-compulsory expenditure. The mid-term budgetary priorities are established in the financial frameworks. Established in 1988 through a voluntary inter-institutional agreement between the three institutions, they lay down by broad category the maximum amounts of expenditure for a period of five to seven years. The current financial framework covers the period 2007–2013. The financial framework cannot be regarded as a multi-annual budget, since the annual budgetary procedure is still essential for determining the actual level of expenditure under the ceilings for the year in question and, above all, for allocating appropriations between the various budget headings. A leptokurtic distribution is a distribution of frequencies with kurtosis > 0; i.e., a distribution with a high peak, slender shoulders and relatively big tails. The kurtosis is the degree of peakedness of a distribution, defined as a normalized form of the fourth central moment of a distribution. Higher kurtosis means more of the variance is to the result of infrequent extreme deviations, as opposed to frequent modestly sized deviations

Dynamics (music · Economic policy · Economics · European union · Political science · Punctuated equilibrium · Sociology · European Union Policy and Governance · Fiscal Policies and Political Economy · Local Government Finance and Decentralization

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