Berry, William and David Lowery. “Convergence and Divergence in Empirical Analyses of Fiscal Politics.” American Politics Quarterly, 17 (October 1989): 446-76.

In recent years, a number of subliteratures in fiscal polities politics have converged toward a core set of hypothesized explanatory variables – representing political, economic, and social conditions – and a common modeling strategy patterned after that of Davis, Dempster, and Wildavsky (1974). But rather than indicating an emerging consensus among the subliteratures about the nature of the budgetary process, the convergence masks substantial divergence over critical assumptions about the nature of decision making. In this article we describe the development of this divergence in assumptions in an effort to evaluate its impact on empirical modeling exercises. We conclude with some prescriptions for defining the research agenda for the budgeting literature through the 1990s.