Punctuated equilibrium in French budgeting processes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We use data on French budgeting to test models of friction, incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium. Data include the overall state budget since 1820; ministerial budgets for seven ministries since 1868; and a more complete ministerial series covering ten ministries since 1947. Our results in every case are remarkably similar to the highly leptokurtic distributions that Jones and Baumgartner (2005) demonstrated in US budgeting processes. This suggests that general characteristics of administrative processes create friction, and that these general factors are more important than particular details of organizational design. The legendary centralization and administrative strength of the French state, especially when compared to the decentralized separated powers structure of the US system, where the theory was developed, is apparently not sufficient to overcome cognitive pressures causing friction. Further, our French data cover a wide range of institutional procedures and constitutional regimes. The similarity of our findings across all these settings suggests that administrative structures alone are less important than the cognitive reasons discussed in the original model.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.033 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".