Bureaucrats and Budgetary Outcomes: Quantitative Analyses

Abstract

The expansion of the public sector in advanced industrial democracies is one of the most important political developments of the last hundred years. Government bureaus throughout the world now provide trillions of dollars annually in services that were previously supplied either privately or not at all -- from parking ramps to pollution control, health care to housing, and rockets to rock concerts. At the beginning of this long period of growth in the public sector, many observers welcomed it as the happy consequence of increasing affluence and the desire for social progress (Wagner 1958). It appeared to them that government, in response to popular demand, was simply shouldering its responsibility for the welfare of the citizenry from cradle to grave. By the 1970s, however, the public sector in many Western democracies accounted for over half of the GNP. By this time, the growth of government had provoked a great deal of alarm -- especially among public choice theorists (Buchanan 1977). After regressing government growth rates on a battery of income, wealth, and population variables, Borcherding (1977) concludes that only about half of the growth in the public sector can be accounted for by increases in public demand.