New York's budget is late, but that's not a new thing. In fact it's not nearly as late as it's been in previous years.

(Chart by Stephen Nessen; information courtesy of the State of New York, Office of the State Comptroller.) 

The peaks and valleys in the chart above don't seem to have any discernible pattern.

But the state’s long record of late budgets is better understood when combined with some historical political context.

One trend that seems apparent from the chart is that each major budget delay –- in 1991, 1997, 1999, 2001 and 2004 (and even 2008) was immediately followed by dramatically shorter delays. That’s most likely due to the public backlash lawmakers faced when public attention was trained on them.

Members of both houses of the state legislature -- the 150 members of the Assembly and 62 members of the state Senate -- are up for election every two years. Once every four years, these little-known lawmakers are on the ballot with gubernatorial and presidential candidates who attract lots of voters to the polls.

That means every other time the lawmakers are up for re-election, they’re often the only ones on the ballot. That leaves them vulnerable to disgruntled, well-paid unions and businesses leaders and other interest groups who could agitate voters going to the polling station.

A few specific historical notes:

Every ten years, legislative lines are redrawn in order to reflect demographic shifts evident in the census (also known as gerrymandering). In 1991 and 2001 there were dramatically delayed budgets. Those are years when legislators didn't face voters and their districts were just redrawn, so they were less likely to concede budget and service cuts to voters unfamiliar with their new legislators.

Some observers believe the delay in 1997 (126 days) was due to a dwindling Republican majority in the state Senate, thanks to strategic pickups by Democrats. Also, Mayor Rudy Giuliani -- a tough-on-crime Republican budget hawk -- was cruising toward re-election in New York City. Legislators, expecting social services to be slashed, sought to avoid making cuts at the state level. 

In 1994, Democratic Gov. Mario Cuomo was going for his fourth term against a little-known Republican in the state Senate named George Pataki. There was no point in making that budget year easy for a governor when one of the legislators sitting in Albany was trying to unseat him. Also brewing was the rise of an angry, upstate businessman, Tom Golisano, the Buffalo-based billionaire founder of Paychex. He bankrolled the formation of the New York State Independence Party and ran for governor that year as well.

In 1998, Golisano ran again, no doubt angered by the 126-day delay in passing the 1997 budget. But by then, lawmakers had enough of an incentive to get the budget done quickly, or face the wrath of angry voters.

By 2002, the first budget passed after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, and a spirit of bi-partisanship permeated some arenas of public service. It was also the first budget that state lawmakers passed after hearing from a newly elected mayor in New York City: Michael Bloomberg, who was ushered into office, as were a majority of City Council members, for a first stint in public service.

The 2004 budget was the first time many voters were going to the polls after the highly controversial 2000 presidential elections, which many Democrats considered stolen (Florida, hanging chads, you remember). Republicans, who by this point saw their majority in the state Senate whittled down to barely a few seats, dug in their heels in order to prevent what they expected to be a tidal wave of Democratic voters heading to the ballot looking for revenge.

Also in 2004, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU’s School of Law released a scathing and scientific report labeling the state’s legislature the most “dysfunctional” in the country. The report offered tangible talking points and evidence for critics of Albany, and trained statewide anger onto the arcane process by which Albany worked.

The following year -- a non-election year -- the budget passed on time.