James D. Savage

Who is James D. Savage?

James D. Savage is a political science professor at the University of Virginia. He is an expert in government budget policies and budget theory. He completed his undergraduate degrees in political science and psychology at the University of California, Riverside, his graduate degrees in political science, public policy, and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and his post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University. At Berkeley, Savage studied under Nelson Polsby and Aaron Wildavsky.

Savage is best known for four books on American and comparative budgeting and fiscal policy: Balanced Budgets and American Politics¹; Funding Science in America: Congress, Universities and the Politics of the Academic Porkbarrel ²; Making the EMU: The Politics of Budgetary Surveillance and the Enforcement of Maastricht ³; and Reconstructing Iraq's Budgetary Institutions: Coalition State Building after Saddam. ⁴

The first book explores the origins of the idea of balancing budgets and its effect on American politics, fiscal policies, and institutional development from 1690 through the Reagan presidency. The book argues that the idea of balancing the budget is fundamentally rooted in American political thought that can be tied, for example, to the political differences that divided the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians.