County Budgetary Dynamics: Findings from Appalachia

• In Event: Agenda Setting Dynamics in Contemporary Policymaking

Abstract

Scholars of budgeting in the policy process have made great strides in understanding the dynamics of countries (Jones et al. 2009), states (Breunig & Koski 2006), and municipalities (Park & Sapotichne 2019). We systematically expand this approach to county governments in Appalachia. As administrative creatures of the state, county governments are more dependent on state budgeting and occupy important spaces in the federal system that hold the prospect of better understanding the linkages between governments within the state. Moreover, county governments are the locus of important government functions like emergency management, public health, and education systems. Counties are the most salient governing structure in rural areas. As such, they hold the promise of better understanding policy processes here in relation to urban environments. We use budget categories from the 55 counties in West Virginia and a distributional, stochastic process approach to understanding county budgeting and tradeoffs within categories. Our findings relate county budget dynamics to the characteristic punctuated dynamics of states and municipalities. We also shed light on important substantive functions where counties play a disproportionate role in policymaking. The paper lays the groundwork for comparing county policy processes to states hierarchically and in comparison to municipalities and fused municipal-county governing systems spatially.

Authors

• Samuel Workman, West Virginia University

• Herschel F. Thomas, West Virginia University

• Corinne Connor, West Virginia University