A Study On Institutional Change Of Democratic Budget Making In The United States

Public budgeting has dual attributes—economic and political attributes. It is not only the most important economic policy tool possessed by government, but also bears important democratic function to express taxpayers'public priority needs. With the rise of the modern tax state, there have been great changes in the national revenues structure as well as in the enhancement of taxpayers'political awareness in democratic budget making. Therefore, it is very important to regard democratic budget making as the main entrance of democratic reforms, to some extent, which exist double urgent aspirations of theory and practice.Although democratic budget-making reform depends on the implementation of related institutions, paying more attention to the representative organs and their budget examination as well as supervision responsibilities is the main route of system construction. In view of the deficiency of more static and descriptive research on developed countries experiences, this study maintains it is crucial to explore the rich contents of democratic budget making and dynamic evolutions of developed countries experiences as well as the key paths to ensure better responsibility performance. Based on the consideration of these issues, this paper tries to apply the historic institutionalism and change theory to the research on democratic budget making: constructing operational framework of democratic budget making concept and selecting American as a single case analysis are the first task.The basic conclusions and main contributions of this paper are followed:Firstly, this paper carried out induction and pectination for the new"democratic budget making"concept. Considering the lacking of systematic analysis and clear definition of this concept, this paper regard it as one kind of associated constitutional institution arrangement after making institutional analyze from both longitude history involvement and horizontal latitudes, which can be expressed and operated concretely: one center( budgetary inspection and supervision power of representative organs), two domain( tax and expenditure), three main institutional domains( administrative control, representatives'outside control and public) and four latitudes (ideas—power—procedure—resource capability). Secondly, after the institutional conjuncture analysis implied by democratic budget making concept, this paper began to focus on structural variables selection and historical stage with institution nodes of the U.S. democratic budget making. Then this paper came to explore three-crucial evolution of American democratic budget making by combining institution change framework, structural variables and historic periods together and constructing environment—modes—contents(ideas, power and interest relationship—procedure—resource capability) framework as well as performance change points. This study found different arrangements of crucial factors and different environments as well as structural variables may bring different change models and performance: although the changes in the external environment or internal mechanisms are likely to create key institutional nodes, we should not ignore the strong influence exerted by public and public interests during institution Evolutions. For the evolution modes, new ideas input and institution learning play more innovative role than that of local experience radiation and induced changes; When it comes to contents change, constitutional system arrangements and effectiveness are more important, that is to say, high-level constitutional idea and power relations produce strong constraints on the role of operational level variables, for example, the role of budgetary procedures and capabilities as well as strategies.Finally, with the increase of tax revenue (accounting for about 95 percent of total national income) and the awakening of taxpayers'consciousness, currently China's new budgetary environments have been formed gradually. China's democratic budgeting reform will benefit a lot through abiding by historic- institutional logic and assimilating Americans'experience. When it comes to change models, the spread of local budgeting innovation and international institution learning can enhance China's democratic budget level; From the perspective of American specific budget changes in the democratic system, the U.S experience demonstrates performance-oriented ideas, the constitutional arrangements of the power system, multiple veto points institutionalized settings (especially the budget amending power of representative organs and the hearing-public mechanism), and budget interest expression and litigation system has a universal application. Based on China's political reality, we can carry out relevant institution learning after the responsibilities among political party committees - the National People's Congress - the government budget responsibilities had been allocated appropriately. At the same time, as for the changing priority of different variables, it is very crucial to cultivate new style budget ideas and related institutional power structures because the expression and protection of public interests require the cooperation of new ideas and structured mechanism,. Based on previous change, the change of operational procedure and resource capability will also promote democratic budgeting performance, while any changes must be integrated into the whole institutional matrix.