ABSTRACT
Incrementalism is an approach to decision making in general and to budgeting in particular. It is used in descriptive and explanatory variants and may refer to the decision-making process or outputs from the process. This perspective relies upon established roles, decision rules, and shared expectations; it broadly divides budgeting into the base and relatively small changes or marginal adjustments; decision making is characterized by a process of successive limited comparison, and politics is the dominant explanatory variable.
