The Korea Local Administration Review

 Budgeting is generally considered to be a political process. But, local politics are more limited than national politics. Social welfare policy, in particular, is an institutional constraint that limits the discretionary choices of decision makers. The aim of this paper is to focus on the structural contexts of decision making processes of social welfare budgets that have received minor attention in the previous researches in order to draw useful interpretations on the mechanisms actually working in the decision making processes used for social welfare budgets. To this end, this paper focuses on governmental grants transferred from the central government to local governments for assigned uses. Both the mechanism of distributing conditional and matching grants in the social welfare sector and the influence of the central government are structural contexts of local government budgeting. For this reason, the social welfare budgets of local governments can be understood as an outcome of routine processes of grant distribution at the level of central government, rather than as a result of political compromise at the level of local governments.