The Punctuated Equilibrium Theory Applied to the Brazilian Public Budget: New Findings for the Latin American Context

ABSTRACT

The public budget has been widely used as an indicator of government attention to measure the distribution of government priorities and the dynamics of budgetary changes across policy sectors. Shifting the debate and analytical locus on budget dynamics to Latin America, recent studies have applied the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory to the Brazilian public budget, following the methodological guidelines of the Comparative Agendas Project. Based on the Brazilian case, the main goal of this article is to discuss how public budgets can be used as an indicator of policy attention for the application of PET in Latin America. This article aims (1) to discuss the application of PET to the Brazilian public budget, highlighting its potential and limitations; (2) to discuss the application of PET in a federative context, where more than one level of government is responsible for producing public policies; (3) to discuss the contextual specificities that should be considered in the application of methodological instruments related to PET. Methodologically, this article presents a set of choices necessary for applying PET to the public budget. Contextual factors show that indicators of change—such as L‐Kurtosis—in countries with late democracies and different processes of social reforms are expressed in different values and analytical forms. A historical conceptual basis specific to Latin American countries is required for a proper understanding of the factors and political dynamics related to budget changes. One of the main contributions of this article is to offer subsidies and parameters so that PET can be applied to the public budget of other Latin American countries.