ABSTRACT
The American states provide a comparative laboratory for the study of public budgeting. Just as any comparative political analysis seeks to generalize about political behavior and to account for deviations, the study of state budgeting seeks to describe and explain the political behavior of state budget makers. Ideally, we hope to develop theories that explain the budgetary outcomes we get among the states. Those theories are most powerful if they can explain outcomes regardless of the state in question-a tall order given the great diversity of the American states.
