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While political controversies over the legitimacy of monetary interventions in Western economies were settled decades ago, the widespread acceptance of fiscal interventions as appropriate tools for achieving economic stability and economic growth is much more recent and much less pervasive. Even the pre-Depression classical economic model specified a role for government monetary policy: ensuring an appropriate stock of money. While institutions of monetary policy making now enjoy both a long history of utilizing monetary policy instruments and a low level of ideological conflict over the legitimacy of those interventions, the institutions of fiscal policy making enjoy neither. Though some governments had begun to practise fiscal interventions before the Second World War, the widespread use of such instruments is, by and large, a post-war phenomenon. Thus, governments have generally had less experience in learning 'how to do it'.

Rapidly changing economic conditions and the acceptance by governments of the responsibility for those conditions have together provided one of the most volatile and perplexing policy contexts for governments in the post-war era. The volatility of economic policy is inherent in its potential for change over the short run. It can take several years before changes are approved and implemented in order to deal with failures in social welfare programmes, transport services, or redistributive taxation provisions. In contrast, the instruments of economic policy may be altered on a daily, monthly, quarterly or yearly basis as conditions change.

Some political theorists maintain that Niccolò Machiavelli was a rather immoral sort. His exhortations to guile, perfidy, deception and opportunism were numerous, his scruples few. Others, in a more revisionist vein, suggest that his preferred tactics were only meant for the common good. Yet, whether Machiavelli was a scientist, a descriptivist, a technician, a moralist or an immoralist is immaterial from one standpoint: he taught us something about the nature of human interaction in the State. Machiavellian interpretations of human events underlie many of our personal impressions of political life. We speak of strategy, tactics, morality, honesty as if the locations of political leaders along those dimensions determine what governments do for us or to us.

Earlier conceptualizations of environmental effects on public spending suffer from at least two weaknesses: (1) a failure to treat those factors to which decision-makers might respond under conditions of environmental stress; and (2) a failure to develop formally the notion that relevant environments will differ for different governmental units. In this paper, several formal models of budgetary decision-making are extended to include environmental variables. Three alternative decision-making models are set out which postulate that (1) environmental stress simply produces random fluctuations about predominantly incremental modes of decision-making; (2) the level of environmental stress systematically enters the budgetary decision calculus; or (3) the relative change from one year to the next in the environmental stress conditions of public agencies systematically affects budgeting decisions. A test application of these models is provided with reference to time series budgetary and environmental data for the municipal government of Oslo, Norway. Budgetary data were assembled for each of four levels of budget formulation and review; and different environmental stress variables were recorded for different public agencies. Results indicate that decision-making models which formalize the notion of relative change are most useful for studying environmental stress effects on budgetary decision-making of public agencies and their reviewing agents.

It is a relatively common occurrence in American politics for state electorates to divide their partisan majorities between different parties, depending on the office contest. Observations concerning these divergent aggregate patterns are usually accompanied by speculation that the theoretical propositions on individual voting behavior, developed and tested in the context of presidential voting, hold less relevance for voting in statewide contests. Evidence presented in this paper does not bear out that view of state elections. The candidate incumbency context of state elections is introduced as an aid in predicting the partisan direction of split-ticket voting at the state level. Setting respondents in various conflict situations with respect to (1) basic party loyalties, (2) net assessments of presidential candidates, and (3) incumbent partisanship yields reasonably accurate specification of split-ticket voting patterns in gubernatorial, senatorial, and presidential contests; it also suggests at least one source of disparate partisan majorities among state electorates.