Suchergebnisse

Scholars have devoted substantial effort to studying the conditions under which political party control affects public policy. One among several advantages for assessing party-policy impacts at the subnational level in the American federal system is the existence of a well-known and easily quantifiable decision by the 50 state governments on an important redistributive policy change, the amount of aid each state "guarantees" its "families with dependent children." Earlier efforts at establishing the effects of party on redistributive policy in the American states have been mixed. The authors suggest that the conditions for party impact can best be represented as the interaction of party, liberal/conservative party ideology, and the closeness or competitiveness of the parties. Given existing theoretical arguments in the literature, the authors model these interactions as characterizing either the party in control or the party system as a whole. The authors test for which of the models is superior in predicting changes in welfare policies and find, on balance, the systemic model is superior to the control model.

This study integrates models of income redistribution developed by economists, who suggest that citizens voluntarily redistribute because of interdependent preferences and rely on the state for implementation owing to the public-good nature of redistribution, and political scientists, who focus on conditions that lead to demands that the state intervene to assist the poor and on the development of institutions that facilitate such demands. We propose a testable theory of redistribution and apply it to data from the American states.The empirical analysis addresses determinants of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children guarantee, adjusted for Medicaid and food stamps to which a family receiving the guarantee would be entitled. We posit significant links between the guarantee and both observable explanatory variables, such as per-capita income, and latent constructs, such as liberal party control. We specify observable indicators for the latent constructs and use the LISREL method to estimate parameters for the indicators and structural coefficients. The findings show that both political and economic variables significantly affect the level of the guarantee.

A comparatively new line of research in political science involves the systematic investigation of political, social, and economic factors important in the formation of public policy. So far, such research has yielded temptingly persuasive evidence that political variables exert little or no independent influence on policy outcomes; that policy outcomes are governed overwhelmingly by socio-economic factors. Stated more succinctly, these findings have raised the question: Does politics make a difference in the policy formation process?We suggest in the following analysis that these prior findings have been the result of the examination of a measure of public policy in which the influence of the political system is likely to be negligible, that islevelsof public revenues and expenditures. To examine this proposition empirically, our study shifts attention to the allocation of the burdens and benefits of state revenue and expenditure policies across income classes. In redirecting analysis to allocations rather than levels of state revenues and expenditures, we focus on a province we believe to be more predictably political.We have taken as our dependent variable the net redistributive impact of revenues and expenditures as represented by the ratio of expenditure benefits to revenue burdens for the three lowest income classes in each state. The major hypothesis of our study is that, in regard to the allocation of the burdens and benefits of state government revenues and expenditures, political variables will have a stronger influence on policy outcomes than will socio-economic variables.

Discusses the general state of research in policymaking and state politics, featuring a typology of various research modalities.