The challenges that Colorado's policymakers face as they attempt to balance their state's budget are familiar to governments nationwide. In the face of the worst economic downtown since the Great Depression, municipalities of all levels have experienced dramatic drops in tax revenue and consequently serious gaps between their revenues and expenditures. This has forced many communities and governments to make painful cuts into public services or raise taxes on an economically-distressed population in efforts to close their budget gaps. Many of these cuts are dramatic and would be unheard of a few years go. For instance, Colorado's legislators, in the face of an almost $600 million deficit, is considering completely eliminating all of its $660 million general-fund spending for higher education, according to a recent article in the Denver Business Journal.
Colorado Backseat Budgeter is an interactive tool that presents the user with this difficult task of balancing the Colorado state budget. Budgeter is sponsored by Colorado State University's Bighorn Leadership Development Program and developed through EngagedPublic.com which seeks to promote "consensus, collaboration and creativity in the public sphere." While I could not find an explicit purpose statement anywhere within the Budgeter's documentation, in an article at Chronicle.com, Brenda Morrison, the director of the Bighorn Program states that "'by putting themselves in the governor's shoes,' people will better understand how the system works."
However, Budgeter does a poor job of illustrating how the system works because it fails to acknowledge many of the constraints that shape public policy decisions and makes little attempts to integrate these constraints into the user's experience. On the other hand, this lack of constraints may also have the interesting side-effect of revealing some important information about the populace's priorities.
In Budgeter the user is presented with an initial layout of the state's spending and revenues, starting the user in the precarious position of having an over $800 million dollar deficit. This initial setup is drawn from current real-world data, albeit limited to the Colorado's general fund, which excludes cash and federal funding. This is stated in the FAQ, but in the interest of transparency, it would be nice if that information was presented to the user up front. The government's expenditures and revenue sources are presented in two pie charts and a subsequent list, and the user can click on any of the categories to modify the amount of spending or raise taxes.
Instead of offering the user complete freedom to modify the amounts, the user instead is offered a list of choices. Many of the choices seem inconsistent, offering a choice that is strictly numerically driven on one end but policy driven on the other end. For instance, under Higher Education, the user has the option to "reduce higher ed spending by 6%," but also to "Fully fund community colleges". The former choice seems arbitrary, whereas the latter has a concrete goal tied to it. The user can receive more detail on the choices, but for the arbitrary choices, the effects seem speculative. The FAQ sheds some light on these choices, stating that the choices were made in consultation with experts and that "some of these are realistic" and some would "require the vote of the people." However, it's odd for the developers to state this point in the FAQ rather than to place these constraints and challenges into the user's experience. This design choice is especially odd given that in certain circumstances the player is given a "constitutional warning" if he or she makes certain choices.
These constitutional warnings appear if the user decides to make a budget modification that violates the Colorado state constitution. For instance, if the user decides to raise any taxes, they receive a warning and are notified that in order to perform this action, it would have to be approved by voters due to the Tax Payer Bill of Rights (TABOR). However, these warnings in no way constrain the user's actions. The user is still able to take these sorts of actions to balance the budget and does not have to jump through any extra hoops to take this action (such as say, a simulated vote by the citizenry). By giving the player these warnings but in no way enforcing them, Budgeter begins to fall apart. One of the main points of a simulation or interactive experience such as this is to demonstrate the limitations of the system it represents by constraining the users actions when the system reaches its limits. If done appropriately, the user can in some way experience the same constraints that policymakers face, but because Budgeter fails to do this, the users experience seems far removed from its real world parallel.
The tool also makes no attempt to acknowledge any sort of broader social constraints. While it acknowledges the problems of any choice when the user violates the constitution, it does not make any effort to acknowledge any social context. This could be accomplished if the user was given a public approval statistic which they had to keep above a certain level. Oftentimes the most desired solution has to be compromised for a solution that does not enrage the broader population, and if the purpose of the tool is to simulate a public policy-makers' experience, it might be helpful to represent the public in some fashion.
The pervasiveness of this issue of lacking constraints becomes more obvious when the user realizes that at any point they can click on the "finished" button and submit their budget, even with huge deficits. This lack of constraints on the final condition means that any choices the player makes have no bearing on whether or not the user can reach the final state. This also is not reflected in the final screen which displays your budget. It tells you nothing of the possible effects of your choices and only defines each category of the budget. In painfully small font underneath each definition, the user's changes to the budget categories is listed - the only mark of the player's actions within the tool.
At the final screen, the user is able to access one of the most interesting features of Budgeter. The user can see how your budget compares to the overall choices that all users have made. At first glance, this feature appears to only further turn an eye to the weakness of the tool as a simulation. To balance the budget the users as an aggregate have made massive across the board spending cuts while raising taxes. These policy changes would likely be very difficult in the real world because of the constitutional violations stated within the game but also because the public would most likely react adversely to these actions. However, the fact remains that most of the people who participated in the game were willing to make spending cuts and raise taxes. This information demonstrates that in an ideal, constraint-free political environment, the users were able to make the tough choices to bring the budget in line.
David Brooks in a recent op-ed article in the New York Times stated that in order for America to restore its economic values of fiscal conservatism, the population's attitude "will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending." What Budgeter may suggest is that this commonly held belief is faulty. Perhaps people are not as self-indulgent as Brooks would suggest but instead have not been properly presented the necessary information in an appropriate manner that would allow them to understand the options available to them as citizens. This conclusion may be a step too far, given the small sample size of Budgeter's users (approximately 1000 respondents), but if the tool was used to communicate priorities to policy-makers as suggested in Budgeter's FAQ, it would communicate that as an aggregate, users presented with clear budget information at the very least understand the compromises that need to be made in order for a government to live within its means.
While many users may take issue with the faults of Budgeter as a simulation due to its lack of constraints, this may also have an interesting side effect of displaying an underlying sentiment of the population. If the intent of Budgeter is to put the user in the shoes of policy-makers, then Budgeter needs to more accurately simulate the experience and acknowledge the legal as well as the social constraints of public policy decisions and enforce those constraints appropriately. But if the intent of Budgeter is to communicate the priorities of the users to policy-makers, Budgeter has revealed that people presented with clear budget information are able to understand the compromises available to them as citizens and make the tough choices to live within their collective means.
Images are a copyright of Colorado State University and EngagedPublic.com
Instead of offering the user complete freedom to modify the amounts, the user instead is offered a list of choices. Many of the choices seem inconsistent, offering a choice that is strictly numerically driven on one end but policy driven on the other end. For instance, under Higher Education, the user has the option to "reduce higher ed spending by 6%," but also to "Fully fund community colleges". The former choice seems arbitrary, whereas the latter has a concrete goal tied to it. The user can receive more detail on the choices, but for the arbitrary choices, the effects seem speculative. The FAQ sheds some light on these choices, stating that the choices were made in consultation with experts and that "some of these are realistic" and some would "require the vote of the people." However, it's odd for the developers to state this point in the FAQ rather than to place these constraints and challenges into the user's experience. This design choice is especially odd given that in certain circumstances the player is given a "constitutional warning" if he or she makes certain choices.
These constitutional warnings appear if the user decides to make a budget modification that violates the Colorado state constitution. For instance, if the user decides to raise any taxes, they receive a warning and are notified that in order to perform this action, it would have to be approved by voters due to the Tax Payer Bill of Rights (TABOR). However, these warnings in no way constrain the user's actions. The user is still able to take these sorts of actions to balance the budget and does not have to jump through any extra hoops to take this action (such as say, a simulated vote by the citizenry). By giving the player these warnings but in no way enforcing them, Budgeter begins to fall apart. One of the main points of a simulation or interactive experience such as this is to demonstrate the limitations of the system it represents by constraining the users actions when the system reaches its limits. If done appropriately, the user can in some way experience the same constraints that policymakers face, but because Budgeter fails to do this, the users experience seems far removed from its real world parallel.
The pervasiveness of this issue of lacking constraints becomes more obvious when the user realizes that at any point they can click on the "finished" button and submit their budget, even with huge deficits. This lack of constraints on the final condition means that any choices the player makes have no bearing on whether or not the user can reach the final state. This also is not reflected in the final screen which displays your budget. It tells you nothing of the possible effects of your choices and only defines each category of the budget. In painfully small font underneath each definition, the user's changes to the budget categories is listed - the only mark of the player's actions within the tool.
At the final screen, the user is able to access one of the most interesting features of Budgeter. The user can see how your budget compares to the overall choices that all users have made. At first glance, this feature appears to only further turn an eye to the weakness of the tool as a simulation. To balance the budget the users as an aggregate have made massive across the board spending cuts while raising taxes. These policy changes would likely be very difficult in the real world because of the constitutional violations stated within the game but also because the public would most likely react adversely to these actions. However, the fact remains that most of the people who participated in the game were willing to make spending cuts and raise taxes. This information demonstrates that in an ideal, constraint-free political environment, the users were able to make the tough choices to bring the budget in line.
David Brooks in a recent op-ed article in the New York Times stated that in order for America to restore its economic values of fiscal conservatism, the population's attitude "will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending." What Budgeter may suggest is that this commonly held belief is faulty. Perhaps people are not as self-indulgent as Brooks would suggest but instead have not been properly presented the necessary information in an appropriate manner that would allow them to understand the options available to them as citizens. This conclusion may be a step too far, given the small sample size of Budgeter's users (approximately 1000 respondents), but if the tool was used to communicate priorities to policy-makers as suggested in Budgeter's FAQ, it would communicate that as an aggregate, users presented with clear budget information at the very least understand the compromises that need to be made in order for a government to live within its means.
While many users may take issue with the faults of Budgeter as a simulation due to its lack of constraints, this may also have an interesting side effect of displaying an underlying sentiment of the population. If the intent of Budgeter is to put the user in the shoes of policy-makers, then Budgeter needs to more accurately simulate the experience and acknowledge the legal as well as the social constraints of public policy decisions and enforce those constraints appropriately. But if the intent of Budgeter is to communicate the priorities of the users to policy-makers, Budgeter has revealed that people presented with clear budget information are able to understand the compromises available to them as citizens and make the tough choices to live within their collective means.
Images are a copyright of Colorado State University and EngagedPublic.com
Leave a comment