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The Politics of the Budgetary Process
Wildavsky 's 1964 classic, the book that made his reputation — and whose incremental-decisions framework remains the most accurate description of how societies actually govern technological change.
The Politics of the Budgetary Process (1964) is the book that established Wildavsky as one of the leading political scientists of his generation. Ostensibly about U.S. federal budget-making, it was in fact a general theory of decision under uncertainty in complex organizations. Its central argument — that budgeting proceeds through incremental adjustment to existing allocations rather than through comprehensive rational calculation — became the foundation for a broader understanding of how institutions actually adapt to change. The book's relevance to AI governance is direct: institutions cannot calculate AI's consequences comprehensively, so they will adapt through incremental adjustment, and the quality of the adaptation will depend on the institutional architecture that shapes the increments.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book was written against the prevailing rational-comprehensive model of budgeting, which held that budgets should reflect systematic evaluation of all alternatives against all objectives. Wildavsky demonstrated that no actual budget is made this way, that the rational-comprehensive model is