Barriers to Coordination in Budgetary Processes

Recent year’s economic crisis has increased public and political demand for a more efficient public sector. One of the ways to improve the effectiveness of the public service is through better overall coordination of the political-administrative organizations that handles the provision of these. However, the knowledge of how these organizations deal with barriers to successful coordination is limited. This Paper will investigate how political-administrative organizations deal with these using the finance committee as a coordination instrument. A central and reoccurring task for political-administrative organizations is the creation of next year’s budget. This is a highly complex and multidimensional task where all aspects of government are up for consideration. The finance committee is a key instrument in the coordination of this process (Allen, Hurcan, & Queyranne, 2016; Peters, 2015). However, the heterogeneous composition of these, and the nature of the tasks they are dealing with, may be potential challenges to coordination. People fear losing privileges; they have ideological and professional views; they are party members; they are members of other sectoral committees (Peters, 2015). Furthermore, politicians are boundedly rational actors with selective attention and multiple preferences, which are often inconsistent (Jones, 1994; Jones & Baumgartner, 2005; Winter & Mouritzen, 2001). The question is to what extent such factors constitute barriers to successful coordination, and what can be done to limit the impact of such barriers. Quantitative survey data on Danish municipalities provides the foundation for the investigation of these questions. Interviews with local politicians will help inform the operationalization of the dependent variable. Danish local governments are an attractive case, as they have many political responsibilities and handles large shares of the total public spending. All 98 municipalities are required to have a financial committee, creating numerous observation points. Moreover, there is a high degree of variation on the abovementioned factors.