Operationalizing Incrementalism: Measuring the Muddles

T he concept of incrementalism as developed in the literature on policy making and budgeting overpromises and underdelivers in terms of descriptive precision and explanatory usefulness. We direct our critique to the problems, apparently unarticulated although surely sensed by analysts, in defining operationally the meaning of incrementalism in describing patterns of budgeting. More specifically, we shall demonstrate that incrementalism is used to characterize not only a method of decision making but also a quite broad range of budgetary outputs, and that this looseness in usage has blinded students to significant aspects of allocative decision making. The confusion surrounding the use of incrementalism in budgetary studies may be related to the adaptation of the concept from the more general interpretations of decision making. The utility of adopting incrementalism seems obvious: budgeting, after all, clearly fits the conditions of complexity, limited information, multiple actors, and imperfect agreement on ends. However, in effecting the transition of incrementalism from the general to budgeting, ambiguities inherent in the concept were incorporated as well.