1
Legislative Fiscal Analysts: Roles and Relationships with Key Budget Actors
The development of the state budget is one of the most important decisions made by elected
officials. In the course of enacting the state budget, many elected and administrative actors are involved.
State agencies prepare their budget requests. The executive budget office reviews and adjusts the agency
requests to reflect the governor’s priorities and objectives. The legislature reviews and amends the
executive budget with the support of legislative fiscal staff. Therefore, several groups of actors are
involved in the development of budget policy.
As administrative actors, legislative fiscal staff and their executive budget office counterparts
play a role in the development of the state budget. There is ample research on executive budget analysts
and the executive budget office at the federal level (Berman 1979; Heclo 1978; Johnson 1984; Mosher
1984; Pearson 1980; Tomkin 1998; Wildavsky 1964) and at the state level (Appleby 1980; Gosling 1985;
Gosling 1987; Lee 1991; Lee 1992; Lee 1997; Thurmaier and Gosling 1997; Thurmaier and Willoughby
2001; Yunker 1990). Less research exists on legislative fiscal offices and legislative fiscal analysts.
Although several studies assessed the basic duties, characteristics, and impact of legislative fiscal staff at
the state level in the 1960s and 1970s, the academic community has been largely silent about these actors
in the state budget process since that time. Most of the early research focused on the functions and
resources of the legislative fiscal office through case studies of single states (Balutis 1975; Budtke 1975;
Butler 1975; Farnum 1975; Kent 1975; Kyle 1975; Rosenthal 1973). More recent research has focused
on the functions and resources of different types of legislative fiscal offices, specifically, joint offices
versus single-chamber offices (Chadha, Permaloff, and Bernstein 2001) and the strategies employed by
legislative fiscal analysts in developing budget recommendations for the legislature (Willoughby and Finn
1996).
This study explores the roles and relationships between legislative fiscal analysts and other key
budget actors in an effort to better understand how legislative fiscal analysts impact state budget policy.
It is part of a larger study on how these roles and relationships condition the influence of legislative fiscal
analysts in state budget development.
Page 1 of 28 
Convention