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 three 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; and Making the EMU: The Politics of Budgetary Surveillance and the Enforcement of Maastricht 3. 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 fundamentaly rooted in American political thought that can be tied, for example, to the political differences that divided the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians. The second book analyzes the politics of congressional earmarking in the federal budget for universities and colleges. This book explores how the idea of peer review of federal research funding is violated by universities that engage in earmarking. The third book examines how the enforcement of the Maastricht Treaty's budgetary rules played a critical role in the creation of the European Union's Economic and Monetary Union and the later enforcement of the Stability and Growth Pact. The common thread connecting these books together is that budgeting and budgetary policies are deeply influenced by and reflect the contest over ideas and values.