Budgeting and Governing

Aaron Wildavsky’s greatest concern, as expressed in his writings, is how people manage to live together. This concern may at first appear to have little to do with the study of budgeting, but for Wildavsky budgeting made living together possible. Indeed, as he argues in Budgeting and Governing, now available in paperback, if you cannot budget, you cannot govern. Wildavsky wrote about budgeting because, in his words, “when a process involves power, authority, culture, consensus, and conflict, it captures a great deal of national political life.” Wildavsky was interested in budgeting because of what it could tell us about the classic questions of politics–who gets what, how, and why?–and ultimately, politics is about finding terms for living together in spite of ideological differences. “Brendon Swedlow and Transaction have rendered policy scholars, budget specialists, and public managers a tremendous service by pulling together this posthumous collection of Aaron Wildavsky’s writings on the vital, if often politically tense, relationship between budgeting and governing. Those who have never read the 16 articles contained in the bookàare in for an intellectual treat. Those already well versed in the major arguments and themes of this work will be reminded of how much the public policy world lost when Wildavsky died in 1993.”–Eric M. Patashnik, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management “[Wildavsky] was one of the few people in the field who took the word æscience,’ as in political science, to mean precisely that: the scientific study of political behavior and its institutions. He was also one of the even rarer groups of people in the discipline who expressed his moral preferences and concerns in plain words.”–Irving Louis Horowitz, Tributes Aaron Wildavsky was Class of 1940 Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, a chair of the political science department, founding dean of the policy school, and a president of the American Political Science Association. Brendon Swedlow is an assistant professor of political science at Northern Illinois University, a research fellow at Duke University’s Center for Environmental Solutions, and a fellow of UCLA’s Center for Governance. Joseph White is Luxenberg Family Professor of Public Policy, Case Western Reserve University.