A Really Simple Explanation of Policy Punctuations? - Interdependence, Complexity, and Policy Punctuations

Florian Prange, Søren Serritzlew

2012

Abstract

We know for a fact that changes in budgets follow a leptokurtic or power law distribution. We have solid evidence that the degree of leptokurtosis can be explained by factors such as special features of policy areas, information processing, decision costs, and differences in the institutional setting (Jones & Baumgartner, 2005a; 2005b, Breunig, 2007; Jones, Sulkin and Larsen, 2003; Breunig and Koski, 2006). However, we do not know why leptokurtosis is omnipresent. In this paper we conjecture that leptokurtosis can be explained by four simple observations which must be true of any budgeting process: (1) that several actors request and spend budgets, (2) several actors allocate funding, (3) that actors which do not receive sufficient funding will eventually close down, and (4) that available funding is limited and often smaller than requested funding. We first review the literature on policy punctuations and leptokurtosis, and identify the four simple observations. We then discuss how a simulation can be useful in investigating the implications of these four observations, and introduce a simulation of the interaction of beggars and philanthropists in a budget game. We show that the four observations can account for the omnipresence of leptokurtosis at the sub system level. They cannot, however, explain the magnitude of leptokurtosis found in empirical distributions of budget changes.

References

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Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Prange F. and Serritzlew S. (2012). A Really Simple Explanation of Policy Punctuations? - Interdependence, Complexity, and Policy Punctuations . In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Simulation and Modeling Methodologies, Technologies and Applications - Volume 1: SIMULTECH, ISBN 978-989-8565-20-4, pages 97-102. DOI: 10.5220/0004055300970102


in Bibtex Style

@conference{simultech12,
author={Florian Prange and Søren Serritzlew},
title={A Really Simple Explanation of Policy Punctuations? - Interdependence, Complexity, and Policy Punctuations},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Simulation and Modeling Methodologies, Technologies and Applications - Volume 1: SIMULTECH,},
year={2012},
pages={97-102},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004055300970102},
isbn={978-989-8565-20-4},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Simulation and Modeling Methodologies, Technologies and Applications - Volume 1: SIMULTECH,
TI - A Really Simple Explanation of Policy Punctuations? - Interdependence, Complexity, and Policy Punctuations
SN - 978-989-8565-20-4
AU - Prange F.
AU - Serritzlew S.
PY - 2012
SP - 97
EP - 102
DO - 10.5220/0004055300970102