Christian Breunig is Professor of Comparative Politics at the Department of Politics & Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. Christine S. Lipsmeyer is Associate Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University, USA, where she also is the Director of the Program in the Cross-National Study of Politics. Guy D. Whitten is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Texas A&M University, USA. He is also the Director of the European Union Center and the Director of the Program in Scientific Political Methodology.

• Introduction: Political Budgeting from a Comparative Perspective 1. Budgetary change in authoritarian and democratic regimes 2. Representative systems and policy punctuations 3. Interpreting fiscal accounting rules in the European Union 4. The politics of fiscal rules within the European Union: a dynamic analysis of fiscal rules stringency 5. Public opinion on policy and budgetary trade-offs in European welfare states: evidence from a new comparative survey 6. A new approach to the study of partisan effects on social policy 7. The effects of immigration and integration on European budgetary trade-offs