Political parties in the United States are usually regarded as too weak and decentralized, too much the prey of office-seeking politicians and special interests, to function effectively as programmatic., policy-effecting agents within the separation of powers. This has been taken as a serious flaw in the U.S. version of representative democracy, prompting cycles of proposed reform; criticisms of the existing set-up as a capitalistic sham; or alternative justifications of the system as pluralist rather than strictly party democracy. Our research challenges these assumptions by demonstrating the existence of strong links between postwar (1948–1985) election platforms and governmental outputs. Platforms' sentences, coded into one of 54 subject categories, are used as indicators of programmatic emphases and are related to corresponding federal expenditure shares. Resulting regression models demonstrate the full applicability of party mandate theory to the United States, and they operationalize its U.S. variants concretely.

Alt et al. Reply: In their Comment [1], Kudrolli and Sridhar present numerical evidence concerning the influence of bouncing-ball orbits on the Porter-Thomas distribution (PT) in the stadium billiard. They conclude that deviations from PT cannot be expected in the range accessible to our experiment. This reinforces our earlier conclusion that our data confirm PT.

A question often posed by students of American state politics is: “Do state political systems leave a distinctive imprint on patterns of public policy?” Prior to recent years the nearly automatic response of political scientists was an unqualified “yes.” More recent research has led to a qualified but increasingly confident “no.”Several recent publications have explored relationships between various indices of state politics, socio-economic characteristics, and public policy. The general conclusion has been that central features of the political system such as electoral and institutional circumstances do not explain much of the variation in policy. There are occasionally high correlations between individual measures of voter turnout, party competitiveness, or the character of state legislatures and some aspects of governmental spending. But these political-policy correlations seem to disappear when the effect of socioeconomic development is controlled.These are disturbing findings. They have not gone unchallenged. But the challenges, rather than reassuring those who have asserted the relevance of parties, voting patterns, and government structures, have demonstrated that the burden of proof now rests on those who hypothesize a politics-policy relationship. The problem has not been resolved.Part of the problem may rest on the conceptualization and measurement of the central variables. Electoral balance or alternation in office is not “inter-party competition,” except in the most mechanical sense. Compare Massachusetts' loose-knit party structure to the centralization of Connecticut's. “Party competition” is not the same as “party organization.” And party competition, voting habits, and patterns of apportionment fall far short of being equivalents of “political systems.”

Do party manifestos matter to government policy? Does a genuine party mandate operate within the British political process? These questions are generally neglected in analyses of British politics, but they are crucial in assessing how far political parties transmit electoral preferences into government action. We try to answer them through a novel use of available data, using content analysis to code and classify policy emphases within the post-war election programmes of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties. Statistical analysis reveals that government party programmes are remarkably well reflected in post-election policy priorities, measured as percentages of central government spending in major policy areas. This gives strong support to traditional mandate theory within the context of the 'Westminster model' of party government. Anomalies, such as a strong relationship between Liberal emphases and expenditures in three key areas, and the more consistent relationship of expenditures with Conservative rather than Labour priorities, are also considered.British constitutional theory is simple: a government enjoying the confidence of parliament can do anything. Against this background the present article checks the validity of another model, that of the party mandate. The underlying research question is: how far do the pre-election policy priorities of the major political parties really anticipate what will happen to public policy after the election? The 'Westminster Model', which concentrates all responsibility and power in the government of the day, appears better suited than alternative democratic arrangements for translating election agendas into policy. ' This article does not purport to cover all the nuances of party programmes that might or might not be so translated. Rather, we seek to look at broad patterns linking the policy emphases of party election programmes to

What is the relationship between certain major structural aspects of state governments and the content of policies adopted in the states? Do the socio-economic environments of the states relate significantly to political structures or the type of policies enacted?The thesis advanced here is that differences in policy, at least in certain substantive areas, are more readily explained in terms of differences in the socio-economic environments of the states than by an examination of structural variables. It will also be maintained that, as policy is independent of structure, so structure is also largely independent of some major aspects of the environment. The specific structural variables to be examined are apportionment, party competitiveness, and divided party control between governors and their legislatures.Six specific propositions will be examined:Proposition 1. The more imbalance in a state's apportionment, the less likely the legislature is to pass “liberal” or welfare-oriented policies beneficial to urban groups.Proposition 2. The more imbalance in a state's apportionment, the less financial aid large cities will receive directly from the state.Proposition 3. The more imbalance in a state's apportionment, the less competitive will be its major parties.3a. the less competitive a state's two major parties, the less welfare-oriented will be the policies adopted by its legislature.Proposition 4. The more imbalance in a state's apportionment, the more likely it is that control of the executive and legislative branches will be divided between parties.4a. The more frequently control of the legislature and executive are divided, the less likely a state will be to adopt welfare-oriented policies.Proposition 5. The more industrialized a state, the more imbalance there will be in its apportionment system.Proposition 6. The more industrialized a state, the higher will be its welfare-orientation.