ABSTRACT
Bureaucracy has been criticized for various malfunctions. But as shown in Chapter 4, a certain aspect of bureaucracy, bureaucratic centralization with an adequate level of work load, produces some benefits. Bureaucratic centralization likely improves information-processing capacity of budget decision makers during the executive budget process in the national government. It also likely reduces institutional frictions over national budget decision making. Bureaucratic centralization significantly reduces the frequency of budget punctuations that are possibly the ramifications of constrained capacity of decision makers and heightened institutional frictions. Despite the advantages, bureaucratic centralization is not without its limits as well. Its effectiveness in enhancing information capacity and reducing institutional frictions is substantially constrained by three contingencies: i.e., the effect of bureaucratic centralization to a certain threshold point, the effect being contingent on partisan environments, and limited impacts on budget stability.
