Incrementalism

Within the field of political science, incrementalism refers to the process of small changes being made over time. Taken together, a number of small changes may lead to massive changes that were not fully realized as they occurred. Within the subfields of public policy and public administration, the term incrementalism has been used specifically to explain how budgeting decisions are carried out at both the state and federal levels.

While the concept of incrementalism was considered to form the most complete description of that process during the early postwar years, subsequent scholarship suggests that it has become an increasingly less apt description of budgetary policy. The shift away from incrementalism has taken place within a political atmosphere in which divided governments have become common. In the United States, While both Democrats and Republicans are determined to carry out their own agendas in budgeting and in other government policies, neither party may ignore the US Constitution or the limitations imposed by the democratic political process.

Brief History

One of the major problems with studying incrementalism is the fact that not all scholars agree on how it should be defined, and one scholar found twelve different acceptable definitions. Advocates of incrementalism suggest that the concept is founded on the tenets of rationalism and pluralism that have long formed the foundation of the American political system. Incrementalism derives from the belief that participants in the policymaking process enter the field from differing knowledge bases. That leads to competing values and goals. Because each participant is capable of checking the other, sweeping changes are more difficult than incremental ones. When making federal budgeting decisions, limits placed on American political actors are derived from the US Constitution, which allows both the president and Congress the right to exercise control over the federal budget. The same is true of governors and state legislatures at the state level.

While the concept of incrementalism was not original to the mid-twentieth century, it was then that Charles Lindblom described incrementalism as the process of "muddling through" as decision-makers sought to simply the decision-making process. In a 1959 article, "The Science of Muddling Through" for the Public Administration Review, Lindblom suggested that policy makers employed small steps to effectuate change. It was the height of the Cold War, and incrementalism was considered to offer a clear alternative to the strong-arm tactics of bureaucratic planning that were evident in the politics of the Soviet Union. Lindblom maintained that the proof of whether or not incrementalism was a "good" policy was dependent on the level of agreement reached when incremental decisions were made.

In 1964, in The Politics of the Budgetary Process, Aaron Wildavsky connected Lindblom's theories on incrementalism with state budgeting decisions, arguing that they were often the result of being cobbled together and varied only slightly over time. Wildavsky and his colleagues subsequently reexamined the concept of incrementalism as it applied to federal budgeting between 1947 and 1995, concluding that it must be understood within an environment in which increased dissensus (as opposed to consensus), downward spending, divided governments, and long-term budget volatility had become common. They contended that changes in the political environment had led to gridlock instead of incremental change.

Impact

The concept of rationality suggests that budget makers examine all aspects of a situation, including looking at alternatives to particular courses of action. In actuality, partisanship frequently interferes with rational decision making. Furthermore, what is rational to one political actor may be viewed as totally irrational by another political actor. Consequently, goals derived from partisan decisions may create conflicts that are not easily reconciled. When that situation occurs, it may be possible to compromise through minor adjustments that occur at an incremental rate. Many scholars believe that the end of the Cold War in the 1990s signaled a rejection of incrementalism in the United States. Subsequent studies of the budget-making process suggested that it was driven more by the market than anything else. Others argued that using the market as a benchmark was detrimental to policy decisions not directly related to budgeting.

Mark Bevir suggests that advocates of incrementalism tend to see it as the best description of the policymaking process because it allows a wide variety of actors to participate in making decisions. At the same time, it provides opportunities for ongoing reexamination and adjustments to existing policies. Some scholars on budgetary decision-making have contrasted incrementalism with other theories common to the field.

In a study of state budgets from 1984 to 2009, Christian Breunig and Chris Koski found that incrementalism in conjunction with punctuated equilibrium provided the best explanation for understanding the budgetary process. They maintain that punctuated equilibrium arises from the attempt to explain aspects of policymaking that incrementation fails to address. Once policy changes are instituted, they become accepted as the new status quo, achieving equilibrium over time.

Bryan Jones and James True contend that initial understandings of incrementalism may have been faulty because the early postwar years were marked by dramatic rather than incremental changes. They also insist that levels of incrementalism have not decreased. However, they do accept a decline in the impact of incrementalism on budgeting decisions. They suggest that incrementalism is highest during periods of strong consensus when levels of volatility decline, negating the need for incremental change.

In 2014, Jones and his colleagues expanded their study of the federal budget to examine the period between 1791 and 2010, arriving at a disrupted exponential incrementalism as a new explanation of decision-making. This explanation suggests that change occurs at a more rapid pace than is possible with traditional incrementalism. The process, they argue, is geometric rather than linear because it is forced to deal with critical moments such as wars and economic downturns and is required to bend when faced with the need to increase or decrease domestic or defense spending for the sake of the other.

The notion that incrementalism provides an acceptable definition of how the overall political process works has been examined across a broad range of fields, encompassing such topics as healthcare, civil rights, education, climate change, and foreign policy. In a 2014 study on child and adolescent access to medical care, Samuel S. Flint demonstrated an incremental process that took place between 1982 and 1997. The success of the process was illustrated by the fact that two-thirds of American children were provided with access to healthcare.

The civil rights movement and the integration of American schools and society have often been cited as classic examples of incrementalist politics. The movement began in the early postwar years and gained steam over the 1950s and 1960s. John Kennedy was the first president to propose major civil rights reforms. After Kennedy's death, it was his successor, Lyndon Johnson, who steered Kennedy's civil rights bill through Congress, winning passage in 1964. Some critics have suggested that the low popularity of Barack Obama's much-maligned Affordable Care Act (2010) was a response to the fact that the change was rapid rather than incremental. The Supreme Court’s approach to rulings concerning LGBTQIA+ is also an example of incrementalism. Many states have also taken a step-by-step approach to decriminalizing same-sex relationships, providing equal treatment for LGBTQIA+ people, same-sex marriage, and reproductive and parental rights for same-sex couples. Because of many outdated laws that remain in certain states, some have argued that the time for incremental politics has long passed. Other modern examples of incrementalism include smoking bans and environmental standards.

Bibliography

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Flint, Samuel S. "How Bipartisanship and Incrementalism Stitched the Child Health Insurance Safety Net (1982-1997)." Health and Social Work, vol. 39, no. 2, 2014, pp. 109–16, doi:10.1093/hsw/hlu019. Accessed 10 Dec. 2024.

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