This Cambridge series, Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions, is built around attempts to answer two central questions: How do institutions evolve in response to individual incentives, strategies, and choices; and how do institutions affect the performance of political and economic systems? The scope of the series is comparative and historical rather than international or specifically American, and the focus is positive rather than normative.

Charles Stewart's work has two important features. One is his use of rational models of congressional changes in budget procedures between the Civil War and the end of World War I. Linking congressmen's career objectives to their local constituencies, he applies the modern Congress model in which a decentralized electoral process leads congressmen to prefer particularistic, localistic policy production over national-interest legislation. He shows that this demand for localistic policy leads to institutional or structural fragmentation, and conflicts with existing leadership and committee structures as well as with the centralizing demands of war and other crises. The political economy of this conflict, which produces opportunities for countervailing reforms, explains the evolution of budget procedure in the long run.

The other prominent feature of the book is Stewart's careful quantitative modeling of budget and spending decisions and outcomes with explicit reference to the impact of institutional constraints. Analyzing the devolution of budget powers of 1885 and its attendant surges in spending, he argues that rather than devolution of power causing spending, both follow from broader social and economic changes that increased demand for spending.