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This study sought to examine the extent to which decentralisation efforts have affected citizen participation in local governance in Kenya. Survey research designs was employed. 371 questionnaires were administered and 16 interview conducted with key stakeholders. The findings revealed that decentralisation influences citizen participation in devolved Governance. 77.3% of the respondents agreed decentralization had promoted political entrepreneurship while 75% contended that decentralization had influenced citizen participation in development of policies and legislation. Moreover, 57.2% of the respondents felt that citizen participation in decentralized policy-making was high while 69% of the respondents were satisfied that decentralization had made it possible for citizens to participate in county budgeting. Only 49% approved the effectiveness of decentralization in promoting citizen participation in participatory budgeting and planning process. The national and county governments should put in place measures to safeguard the independence of the counties in realizing the objective of citizen participation in governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fiscal contrition refers to the phenomenon of policy‐makers becoming aware of the social costs of fines and fees, recognizing a need to reduce those costs, and taking action to do so. In order to reveal the occurrence of fiscal contrition, this analysis examines detailed budget data from three U.S. counties. Findings indicate a dominance of predatory over punitive monetary sanctions in county budgets. That is, fines and fees that extract revenue from a justice‐involved population are more common than those with social control objectives. The analysis also reveals patterns and nuances in fine and fee usage and the revenue they produce, which illuminates pathways for reducing reliance on fine and fee revenue. This approach provides useful context for the burgeoning scholarship focused on the role of monetary sanctions in fueling social inequities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Although many studies have investigated how well government websites have implemented website accessibility standards, such as Section 508 and WCAG 2.0, very little research has been conducted exploring what factors influence the level of implementation. Based on the organizational innovation model proposed by Frances Berry, this study examines 342 county government websites in the USA and analyzes how several factors, such as budget resources, local demographics and forms of county government, influence the accessibility of the sites. The result of the OLS estimate indicates that the complexity of the websites and the county population density are the most important predictors of web accessibility. County budget is also a marginal predictor, while the percentage of the population with disabilities is a negative predictor. Given the slow progress in the implementation of higher accessibility standards in the USA, the findings of this study provide timely implications for policymakers and governments to improve the quality of their websites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Categorizing places based on their network connections to other places in the region reveals not only population concentration but also economic dynamics that are missed in other typologies. The US Office of Management and Budget categorization of counties into metropolitan/micropolitan and central/outlying is widely seen as insufficient for many analytic purposes. In this article, we use a coreness index from network analysis to identify labor market centrality of a county. We use county-to-county commute flows, including internal commuting, to identify regional hierarchies. Indicators broken down by this typology reveal counterintuitive results in many cases. Not all strong core counties have large populations or high levels of urbanization. Employment in these strong core counties grew faster in the postrecession (2008–2015) than in other types of counties. This economic dimension is missed by other typologies, suggesting that our categorization may be useful for regional analysis and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2005, New York (NY) state capped the growth of county-level Medicaid spending, which abruptly decreased counties' Medicaid outlay in both relative and absolute terms. This study exploits this discontinuity in county Medicaid outlay to estimate the impact of the relief mandate policy on county budgets and property tax levies. It bridges a gap in the public finance literature by addressing local government responses to a sudden decrease in the outlay of a large mandatory spending category. We find a compositional change but no income effect on non-Medicaid spending. However, the policy reduced the effective property tax rate significantly by 6.6 to 8.1 percent on average among affected NY counties after the enactment of the policy relative to control counties. This study advances our understanding of local fiscal responses to an intergovernmental fiscal policy that changes how state and local governments share the costs of a large public social insurance program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local governments operate in contexts that significantly vary in their complexity, turbulence, and munificence. Such variations in context have important implications for organizational outcomes and practices, including budgetary orientations. To evaluate public sector organizational practices, we focus on budget functions in California county proposed budgets during 2012–2017. These public documents present a wealth of untapped information, which shed light on a number of key organizational variables of interest. Computational text analysis methods offer a highly generalizable means of tapping into public documents in order to generate objective organizational data. Using budget narratives and a general method for analyzing texts offered by the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach, we assess the relevance of organizational context for control, management, and planning budget functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Budget transparency innovations bring new extent and forms of transparency. The aim of the article is to explore the diffusion of budget explorers, that is, a budget transparency innovation extremely popular in the Czech Republic, and to evaluate their impact on voluntary budget information disclosed. Careful mapping of the diffusion using a survey of budget explores in 72 former Czech district towns and media analysis shows that the key success factor was its convenience for politicians, as it is attractive, easy to implement and up-to-date demonstration of their transparency. Budget explorers are nowadays a standard extension to accounting software, and their usage is evaluated in several government transparency competitions. The major benefit of the budget explorers is that they made for the first time publicly available detailed public financial information, changed the standard of best practice and drew some public attention. At the same time, they, unfortunately, narrowed the scope of the budget transparency debate by omitting the importance of the draft budget and introduction of performance measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Although legislatures typically use majority rule to allocate a budget in distributive legislation, unanimous consent over the broad allocation of benefits is pervasive. I develop a game‐theoretic model where members strategically interact in a universal coalition to determine allocations, with noncooperative bargaining as a threat point for the breakdown of cooperation. To quantify the effects of political power on the agreed‐upon allocation, I structurally estimate the model using the “Bridge Bill Capital Budget” in 1992. I find that 16.73% of the budget would be allocated differently if allocations were determined only based on actual needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political campaigns involve, in the simplest case, two competing campaign groups which try to obtain a majority of votes. We propose a novel mathematical framework to study political campaign dynamics on social networks whose constituents are either political activists or persuadable individuals. Activists are convinced and do not change their opinion and they are able to move around in the social network to motivate persuadable individuals to vote according to their opinion. We describe the influence of the complex interplay between the number of activists, political clout, budgets, and campaign costs on the campaign result. We also identify situations where the choice of one campaign group to send a certain number of activists already pre-determines their victory. Moreover, we show that a candidate’s advantage in terms of political clout can overcome a substantial budget disadvantage or a lower number of activists, as illustrated by the US presidential election 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid‐1990s, most Canadian provinces have enacted balanced budget laws (BBLs). Critics argue that these laws are empty political gestures that are ignored during economic slowdowns. We consider BBLs in the Canadian provinces from 1981 to 2013 and find that provinces with stronger rules had better deficit and debt records overall. Recessions make it more difficult to achieve positive outcomes, but we find no obvious difference between the effects of BBLs during normal economic conditions and “bad times.” We conclude with suggestions for how the design of BBLs could take better account of jurisdiction‐specific business cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the models that integrates budget allocation, national security, military intelligence, and human capital of the country. Topics discussed include impact of quality of country's human capital on the effectiveness of the country's military intelligence; relationship between the government's various civilian expenditures and its capacity to achieve a cost-effective intelligence; and effectiveness of data collection for the same.

We compare patterns of change in budgetary commitments by countries during periods of democracy and authoritarianism. Previous scholarship has focused almost exclusively on democratic governments, finding evidence of punctuated equilibria. Authoritarian regimes may behave differently, both because they may operate with fewer institutional barriers to choice and because they have fewer incentives to gather and respond to policy-relevant information coming from civil society. By analysing public budgeting in Brazil, Turkey, Malta and Russia before and after their transitions from or to democracy, we can test punctuated equilibrium theory under a variety of governing conditions. Our goal is to advance the understanding of the causes of budgetary instability by leveraging contextual circumstances to push the theory beyond democracies and assess its broader applicability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Olympic Committee and sport organizations in Bosnia and Hercegovina function mainly as associations of citizens. Therefore, information about financial model and amount of financing of programs they deal with are rather heterogeneous without exact data. Adequate legal framework regulating sports is a starting basis for its efficient public financing system. The goal of this research is to determine to which extent the public financing from the budget of Bosnia and Hercegovina impacts achievement of excellent sport results, such as winning of the Olympic medal, in comparison to the EU countries and Ell candidates. The research sample include Bosnia and Herzegovina and eight EU member states (Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia and Sweden), as well as Serbia as the EU candidate country. The sample used involves: number of population, country budget, sport grant, GDR grant for sport per resident, grant for sport compared to the budget, Olympic medal per resident, Olympic medal compared to the budget, Olympic medal compared to grant for sport, Olympic medal compared to GDR all of those used as predictive indicators, including the number of medals awarded at Summer Olympic Games, at Winter Olympic Games and total number of medals won at the Olympic Games. This research includes period from 2008 to 2014. Regression analysis used here showed that the group of predictive indicators, which involves the amount of budget and amount of assigned financial means for sports, as well as the number of population, has significant impact on the number of the Olympic medals won. Based on the research results, it is recommended that Bosnia and Herzegovina harmonizes its legal regulations which could provide efficient and effective financing of sport, thus creating a positive effect on achieving excellent sport results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]