With so many American politics scholars turning their gaze to subnational governments, Means, Motives, and Opportunities arrives at an opportune time. In this book, Christian Breunig and Chris Koski use theory from the policy process literature to explain how interest group environments and governors’ powers influence state budgeting. Analyzing data on state government expenditures in ten categories from 1984 to 2010, they examine patterns of change, stability, and growth in different issue areas of state budgets. Based on a series of quantitative results and case studies, they draw inferences about the importance of “motives” (political differences across issues), “opportunities” (differences in interest group environments), and “means” (governors’ institutional powers) for generating different patterns of change in state expenditures.

The book’s most prominent theoretical foundation is Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, or PET, which Frank Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones introduced in their 1993 book, Agendas and Instability in American Politics. As Breunig and Koski summarize, PET focuses on patterns of policy change: while many think of policy as changing incrementally, PET predicts periods of little change occasionally interrupted by large, sudden changes (punctuations). A central idea of PET, they explain, is that policymakers struggle to manage a deluge of information, so they delegate authority to subgovernments with expertise in different policy areas. However, over time, the subgovernments fail to adjust to new or changing definitions of the problem. Eventually, when the attention of the public and policymakers shifts, the needed policy updates are large, and policy changes dramatically. For this book, then, the primary questions are about the extent to which change in state government expenditures is punctuated—and how that varies by issue, interest group environment, and the extent of governors’ institutional powers.

The book presents a theory with three steps. First, issue attention generates motives for policy change. They write that they are not trying to explain why attention to an issue increases when it does; instead, their main prediction is that when attention does shift, it causes sudden, large changes in state budgets. Second, the type of interest group environment helps to determine how much attention the issue gets from policymakers as well as the opportunities for policy change. Third, state institutions affect governors’ ability to seize these opportunities. In Table 2.1, they summarize how the interest group environment and governors’ powers can produce different patterns of policy change, in particular by conditioning the degree to which the change is punctuated and the extent of long-term growth in a budget category.

The book’s empirical analysis features three chapters of quantitative statistical analysis and one chapter of case studies. The quantitative chapters examine U.S. Census of Governments data on each state government’s expenditures from 1984 to 2010, broken down into ten spending categories. Chapter 3 shows that most state government expenditures go toward education, welfare, government, and highways, whereas very little is spent on parks and police. Examining annual percentage changes in spending in each of these categories and states, they find mostly small annual changes and occasionally very large ones. From their analysis of the distribution of changes, they conclude that the evidence shows punctuation rather than the alternative of incrementalism and that relatively more punctuated budget areas have lower long-term growth.

In later chapters, they focus on the role of interest groups and governors. They theorize that issue areas can be defined by three types of interest group environments: “capture,” where the number of interest groups is low; “deadlock,” where it is high; and “instability,” where it is middling. To measure the interest group environments on each of the ten issue areas in each state, they use Virginia Gray and David Lowery’s interest-group density data from their 1996 book, The Population Ecology of Interest Representation, and assign each group to one or more of the ten budget categories. They find that the number of groups in a state category has a U-shaped relationship with the degree of punctuation in expenditures. They also conclude there is support for their argument that stronger governors—who have greater power through agenda-setting and vetoes—can make large budget increases larger and large budget cuts deeper.

Breunig and Koski should be commended for taking on an important, understudied topic. Public budgeting gets far too little attention in modern American politics research, especially considering that every government must produce budgets and those budgets are a way of understanding the government’s priorities. Public budgeting is also a difficult topic for social scientists because, as Breunig and Koski explain, there are so many moving parts, so many different policy issues in play, and so many political actors involved. Budgeting is not about a single policy issue; it is about cobbling together a package of many policies. For this reason, Breunig and Koski do not focus on specifics of any policy area, such as increases in Medicaid expenditures, but rather try to figure out how governors put the many pieces together in the face of interest groups all clamoring for their piece of the pie. Moreover, starting by focusing on governors and interest groups makes sense, and one can also understand the reasoning behind the decision to focus on the whole budgetary picture rather than a few policy parts in depth.

At the same time, one cannot help but feel as though something important is missing from a book on public budgeting that does not dig into the details of how spending on particular government programs is decided. The book is focused on the magnitude and regularity of spending changes in the ten categories and far less on what, substantively, those changes mean, or what the status quo was before the changes. Yet some of those policy particulars—the parts—might be quite important for understanding a state’s budget as a whole.

Consider one of the ten categories they examine: welfare. As they show in Chapter 3, welfare spending in the states has been on a steady path of growth. Much of that spending and growth is almost certainly Medicaid. While Breunig and Koski describe decisions about budgeting as an interaction between governors and interest groups in which governors have considerable agency, entitlement programs seem to follow a somewhat different logic, where the amount spent is a function of who is eligible for what benefits. At any given time, executives only have so much control over those things. Thus, some consideration of the processes that determine entitlement spending seems important here, especially since the combination of Medicaid and K-12 education spending makes up a large proportion of every state’s budget—and thereby stands to affect what is available to be spent on everything else.

Also, the analysis in this book is mainly of patterns of state spending and does less to consider taxes and decisions about revenue. It may be, moreover, that the politics of public budgeting is different during times of economic downturns than during periods of growth and flush state coffers. Future work might consider how key elements of Breunig and Koski’s theory would vary with those broader economic conditions.

Finally, there is still a pressing need for work that puts the focus on specific groups and policies. Because Breunig and Koski set their sights on the overall system of public budgeting in all states, even the chapter that features data on interest groups is limited to counts of groups in different budget categories; they do not describe what the groups are, what they assume about their policy goals, or whether the groups are large or small. The findings presented in Chapter 4 align with their theoretical expectations, but at the same time, some readers might wish there had been a more detailed discussion of what was going on in the various interest group environments.

Means, Motives, and Opportunities therefore starts to fill a gap in the political science literature by focusing on the politics of public budgeting in the U.S. states. No single book can do everything, and Breunig and Koski have opted to emphasize governors and interest groups and examine state budgets as a whole rather than in terms of their many parts. The theory and findings make for a noteworthy extension of PET and a contribution to the policy process literature. Going forward, scholars should pursue in-depth research on some of the most important parts of state budgets, such as Medicaid, K-12 education, and tax policy, with consideration of all the political actors involved in them—including interest groups, legislators, political parties, bureaucracy, and policymakers at other levels of government. By advancing our knowledge of politics in these specific areas, the result would also be a better understanding of state budgets as a whole.