Bureaucratization, Punctuated Equilibrium and School Budgets.

For half of a century, models of non-rational behavior have grown in popularity for explaining the behavior of administrative organizations. However, models of non-rational behavior are notoriously difficult to test because non-rational behavior is often difficult to separate from fully rational behavior. Recent research has suggested that particular types of non-rational processes should produce "punctuated" equilibria rather than "instantaneous" equilibria. In these non-rational processes, a decision-maker under responds to changes for a long period of time. Once pressure for change becomes overwhelming, the decision maker adopts a radical change. This is called "punctuation". The key to identifying this type of non-rationality of a processes' rationality is the comparative success of fitting the observed behavior to "punctuated" rather than "instantaneous" equilibria. True, Jones, and Baumgartner (1999) developed a method for comparing the distribution of decision outputs as a strategy for assessing the relative degree of "punctuation" in the decision processes. By assessing the kurtosis (or "peakedness") of the distribution of decision outputs, one can get a sense of the excess (compared to a standard, normal distribution) of low and high rates of change - a sign of punctuated equilibrium. This paper extends these recent developments by adapting the method to a comparative kurtosis framework. The results suggest that bureaucracy in K-12 schools serves to reduce (rather than amplify) the punctuations in budgeting processes. The paper concludes with a discussion of the potential extension of the empirical results and modifications to the testing procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]