Mandates and Policy Outputs: U.S. Party Platforms and Federal Expenditures

Abstract

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.

Testing Models of Distributive Politics using Exit Polls to Measure Voters’ Preferences and Partisanship

“…The two major American parties have often proposed very different platforms on spending as well as on other matters. 28 Although identifying causal relationships is not straightforward, there appears to be a clear correlation between the platform proposals and the implemented policies, which is consistent with the "mandate" model (Budge and Hofferbert, 1990;King and Laver 1993). At the district level the situation does not appear much different: individual candidates for the House have also been shown to systematically assume divergent positions (Erikson and Wright, 1997;Ansolabehere, et al, 2001).…”

Intersections. Eejsp_vol2_no1

“…Besides exogenous factors (which partly incorporates the 'resources' category) and dummies (mostly used for election years/periods), three major variable clusters emerge: pledge-related, partyrelated and government-related factors. Pledge-related variables are associated with the 9 For saliency studies, the most widely used pairing of variables consisted of the issue emphases in federal expenditure categories (dependent variable) and those of election platforms (which was used as the explanatory variable; in this the authors followed the lead of Budge and Hofferbert, 1990). This research direction is strongly tied to the work of the Manifesto Research Group (MRG)/Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) and the policy topic coding system used by the latter (see https://manifestoproject.wzb.eu/coding_schemes/1).…”

“…On the one hand, 'saliency'-based approaches (such as the classic study by Budge and Hofferbert, 1990) map general trends in policy-making (often relying on budgetary data) in order to gauge the relevance of party manifestos in setting the direction of government. 'Pledge' research, by contrast, singles out individual commitments and the fulfillment thereof, regardless of overarching tendencies in governance (see e.g., Royed, 1996;Thomson, 2001;Thomson et al, 2014).…”

Mixed-methods analysis of political parties׳ manifesto discourse on rail transport policy: Westminster, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish elections 1945–2011

“…It contributes to understanding of the connection between political representation and rail transport 3 policy. It is a relationship explained by both mandate and accountability theory (Budge and Hofferbert, 1990;Royed, 1994;Fearon, 2003). The former asserts that when in government parties should implement the policies that they promised when running for office.…”