Malapportionment Party Competition, and the Functional Distribution of Governmental Expenditures

Abstract

Most students of American politics traditionally have argued that it is desirable that legislative apportionment systems conform as closely as possible to an ideal of numerical equality, and that it is desirable that major political parties actively compete for elective office. Admittedly this argument has been in large part only implicit, but, since most theoretical argument in political science has been implicit, this does not imply that apportionment or party competition have not been considered to be important by students of politics. Indeed several recent articles in professional journals have been published which seem to derive at least a portion of their appeal and raison d'être from a “demonstration” that students of politics have been guilty of the sin of credulity by holding these implicit beliefs.The tone of much of this work is aptly expressed by the title of a popularizing article by David Brady and Douglas Edmonds, “One Man, One Vote—So What?” Brady and Edmonds—after some extensive, but, unfornately not very discriminating statistical computations—concluded “that the whole Pandora's box of evil consequences which supposedly result from malapportionment—from right-to-work laws to not spending enough on school children—really has little to do with malapportionment.” Although somewhat more cautious in his approach, Thomas R. Dye reached the similar conclusion that “on the whole, the policy choices of malapportioned legislatures are not noticeably different from policy choices of well-apportioned legislatures.”

Reapportionment and Public Policy: State Legislators' Perspectives*

“…in a skeptical study published in 1968, Pulsipher andWeatherby (1968: 1218) found a positive relationship (significant at the level equal to or greater than 80%) between malapportionment and total state expenditures, higher education, total public welfare, and housing and urban renewal. Also contrary to the findings of Dye et al.…”

The Determinants of Public Revenues for Higher and Lower Education: A Thirty-Year Perspective

“…Sacks and Harris (1964) postulated that intergovernmental transfers would explain a substantial amount of the variance in state-local government expenditures, and showed that these transfers accounted for most of the difference in the R 2 of .72 in 1942 versus .53 in 1957 in studies regressing these expenditures on income, density, and urbanization. Pulsipher and Weatherby (1968) introduced measures of malapportionment and of party competition as variables explaining state and local government expenditures. Although they do not contribute strikingly to the explanation of variance, these variables are interesting as examples of possible political variables.…”

The Study of Political Feedback Using Nonrecursive Causal Models: The Case of State Divorce Policies

“…Well-apportioned legislatures, in which urban and other groups are more equitably represented, are more likely to create permissive laws (see Grumm, 1968;Pulsipher and Weatherby, 1969). 921 6) Innovative states are expected to be more responsive to divorce rates and hence more likely to adopt and implement permissive divorce policies than are states which are not innovative in their policies (Walker, 1969).…”