Legislative Fiscal Analysts: Roles in Legislative Budget Development and Relationships with State Budget Actors

The research explores the roles and relationships of legislative fiscal analysts with key budget actors during legislative budget development. The study relies upon data from 57 telephone interviews with legislative fiscal analysts, legislators, agency officials, and executive budget analysts in four states. The current study reveals that legislative fiscal analysts provide the basic foundation for legislative deliberation and decision making on the budget. Legislative fiscal analysts narrow the range of legislative discussion by identifying issues, informing legislators about agency budgets and programs, and in some states, developing policy alternatives and/or making specific budget recommendations. The most important activity performed by the legislative fiscal analysts is analysis of agency budget requests. Of the various roles that analysts can assume during legislative budget development such as clerical worker, monitor of expenditures, facilitator of information, and policy initiator, the facilitator role was found to be the most appropriate and important role. Analysts and legislators develop relationships where legislators rely upon legislative fiscal analysts for budgetary and programmatic information. Legislator reliance upon analysts is a product of analyst expertise in a specific policy area. Agencies understand the importance of analysts as significant sources of information for the legislature and therefore, a majority of the agency officials indicate that it is very important to establish good relationships with legislative fiscal analysts. Although legislative and executive analysts report collegiality, the importance of establishing a good relationship is less important than that reported by agency officials.