¹ See for example: Dawson, Richard E. and Robinson, James A., “Inter-Party Competition, Economic Variables and Welfare Policies in the American States,” The Journal of Politics, 25 (1963), 265–289CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hofferbert, Richard I., “The Relation Between Public Policy and Some Structural and Environmental Variables in the American States,” The American Political Science Review, 60 (March, 1966), 73–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sharkansky, Ira and Hofferbert, Richard I., “Dimensions of State Politics, Economics, and Public Policy,” The American Political Science Review, 63 (September, 1969), 867–879CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sharkansky, Ira, “Problems of Theory and Method: Environment, Policy, Output, and Impact,” paper delivered at Conference on Measurement of Public Policies in the American States, Ann Arbor, July 28 – August 3, 1968Google Scholar; and Dye, Thomas R., Politics, Economics, and the Public: Policy Outcomes in the States (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966)Google Scholar.

² For one of the more recent articles and comments on the impact of political variables after controls are made for socioeconomic variables, see Fry, Brian R. and Winters, Richard R., “The Politics of Redistribution,” American Political Science Review, 64 (June, 1970), 508–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sullivan, John L., “A Note on Redistributive Politics,” American Political Science Review, 66 (December, 1972), 1301–05CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Breton, Albert in The Economic Theory of Representative Government (Chicago: Aldine, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar has argued that the effect of price on the supply curve should be insignificant — i.e., the tax (price) of public services is constant per unit and has no effect on the shape of the supply curve. If this is the case, Figure 1 would be similar to the figure below.

Demand and Supply of a Public Service

Notice that this assumption by Breton would not change any of the following arguments.

⁴ On income prompted demand shifts for inferior goods, see Samuelson, Paul A., Economics, 8th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970) p. 408Google Scholar.

⁵ Dawson and Robinson, “Inter-Party Competition.”

⁶ Ibid., p. 266.

⁷ Key, V. O. Jr.Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951) p. 337Google Scholar.

⁸ Ibid., p. 337.

⁹ Ibid., p. 307. Beginning with Dawson and Robinson, the hypothesis that the have-nots lose in a disorganized politics has been repeatedly examined through the study of welfare expenditures and interparty competition. One of the more recent studies finding support for the hypothesis (after allowing for interaction betwen interparty competition and “legislative professionalism”) is provided by Carmines, Edward G., “The Mediating Influence of State Legislatures on the Linkage Between Interparty Competition and Welfare Policies,” American Political Science Review, 68 (Sept. 1974), 1118–1124CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Possible examples of interparty competition forcing a reduction in welfare expenditures are provided by those Scandinavian countries which have been dominated for a long period by Socialist parties; these parties' recent losses in strength have been popularly explained by a “taxpayers' revolt” against welfare expenditures.

¹¹ Breton, , The Economic Theory of Representative Government, pp. 192–193Google Scholar.

¹² Luttbeg, Norman R., Public Opinion and Public Policy: Models of Political Linkage (Homewood, Illinois: The Dorsey Press, 1968), pp. 1–10Google Scholar.

¹³ Ibid., p. 4.

¹⁴ Luttbeg, p. 7.

¹⁵ An excellent discussion concerning how the presence or absence of an intervening variable model may be detected can be found in Cnudde, Charles F. and McCrone, Donald J., “Party Competition and Welfare Policies in the American States,” American Political Science Review, 63 (September, 1969), 858–866CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Using the aggregate data normally available for the study of state and local expenditures, one cannot distinguish the belief-sharing and role playing conceptions of the socialization model. If individual data on citizen preferences, elite preferences, and elite perceptions of citizen preferences are available, then one may be able to determine which of these submodels is more appropriate. The two socialization submodels are not competing models: both could be operative.

(None of Luttbeg's models are competing in the sense that they make opposing assumptions. See Sullivan, John L., “Linkage Models in the Political System,” in Public Opinion and Public Attitudes, ed. Wilcox, Allen R. (New York: Wiley, 1974), pp. 637–659Google Scholar.

¹⁷ The analyses may also reveal evidence on nonlinkage models. A finding of consistently high translation errors would support a hypothesis that expenditures are determined according to one of the nonlinkage models. Stated differently, one might suspect that a nonlinkage model is operative only when surrogate measures for citizen preferences (e.g., socioeconomic variables) poorly account for variation in expenditure levels. The “explanatory power” of socioeconomic variables could then be further studied for relationships to political process variables thought to facilitate operation of a nonlinkage model. This is the approach of Lineberry, Robert and Fowler, Edmund in “Reformism and Public Policies in American Cities,” American Political Science Review, 61 (September, 1967), 701–716CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Evidence of such relationships may permit one to speak of policy biases created by particular political process variables. In nonlinkage models, decision makers' values directly affect expenditure levels. Where most decision makers' values deviate from citizen preferences in a similar direction, then those political process variables which facilitate operation of a nonlinkage model (e.g., low party competition, reformed municipal structures) may appear to affect expenditure levels independently.

¹⁸ See for example: Froman, Lewis A. Jr., “The Categorization of Policy Contents,” in Political Science and Public Policy, ed. Ranney, Austin (Chicago: Markham Publishing Co., 1968), pp. 41–52Google Scholar; and Reagan, Michael D., “Policy Issues: The Interaction of Substance and Process,” Polity, 1 (Fall, 1968), 36–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ For a definition and discussion of distributive and redistributive policies, see Lowi, Theodore J., “American Business, Public Policy, Case Studies and Political Theory,” World Politics, 16 (July, 1964), 677–715CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Salisbury, Robert and Heinz, John, “A Theory of Policy Analysis and Some Preliminary Applications,” a paper presented to the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., September, 1968Google Scholar. Printed in Policy Analysis in Political Science, ed. Sharkansky, Ira (San Francisco: Markham, 1970), pp. 39–60Google Scholar.

²⁰ Note the necessity of using absolute values of the differences. If these were not used, then one is back to the largely atheoretical position that particular political variables affect the direction of translation errors. With absolute values, one is specifying that political variables, as linkage mechanisms, affect or cause the degree of translation error.

²¹ Mueller, Eva, “Public Attitudes Toward Fiscal Programs,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 77 (May, 1963), 210–234CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² For a mathematical proof that such a preference pattern would be exhibited in public expenditure patterns, see Borcherding, Thomas and Deacon, Robert, “The Demand for the Services of Non-Federal Governments,” American Economic Review, 62 (December, 1972), 891–901Google Scholar.

²³ Discussions and demonstrations of the empirical inappropriateness of these assumptions abound in the political science literature. For discussions of the absence or presence of information, see Berelson, Bernard et al. , Voting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954)Google Scholar; Campbell, Angus et al. , The American Voter (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964)Google Scholar; Key, V. O., The Responsible Electorate (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Eva Mueller, “Public Attitudes Toward Fiscal Programs.” For discussions of probability of participation, see Lowi, “American Business,” Dahl, Robert, Who Governs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961)Google Scholar, and Milbrath, Lester W., Political Participation (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965)Google Scholar. For discussions of majoritarian decision making, see Dahl, Who Governs, and the many discussions of community power and decision making. A more extensive review of much of the literature relating to these assumptions can be found in Sullivan, “Linkage Models.”

²⁴ This assumption is, of course, simply stating that an individual's attitudes and values are primarily the products of the conditions in which he lives. Whether one accepts a behaviorist (stimulus-response) or cognitive orientation to psychology, this is a reasonable assumption.

²⁵ There are a large number of both theoretical and empirical reasons for assuming such an aggregation rule. Breton, The Economic Theory of Representative Government, has shown that most governments supply more than a single service, that this feature allows representatives certain discretion in the development of the mix of services provided, and that logrolling types of decision rules will be used by the representatives. Similarly, the studies of political decision making in cities and states show that decision rules close to those posited in descriptions of pluralism do, in fact, dominate the decision making process. For a more complete discussion of decision rules and their implications for politics, see Buchanan, James and Tullock, Gordon, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1962)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ A more precise estimation of public expenditures and their determination would require a multiple equation model in which the endogenous variables would include per capita expenditures, transfer payments, and debt. The exogenous variables could be the socioeconomic characteristics of the political jurisdiction. For examples of these models see Borcherding and Deacon, “The Demand for the Services of Non-Federal Governments,” and Bergstrom, Theodore C. and Goodman, Robert P., “Private Demand for Public Good,” American Economic Review 63 (June, 1973), 280–296Google Scholar.

²⁷ One may no longer distinguish the relative “importance” of environmental and political variables by the variance explained in a common dependent variable when Y _ij is treated as a function of environmental variables and is treated as a function of political variables. Restrictions on the ability to focus on statistically “explained” variance may be a blessing in disguise. As in most empirical work guided by theory, one's interest is in testing the structure and direction of relationships between operationalized theoretical concepts in the linkage models. The empirical congruence of alternative structural relationships may be of major theoretical relevance even when little statistically “explained” variance is at issue. In fact, the linkage models predict that little variance will remain in : most of the variance in Y _ij will be explained by environmental variables. The theoretical issue is not, “how important are political variables?” Rather, the issue is: “how are political variables important?”

²⁸ Lineberry and Fowler, “Reformism and Public Policies.”

²⁹ Crain, Robert, The Politics of School Desegregation (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1968)Google Scholar.

³⁰ Morgan, David R., “Political Linkage and Public Policy: Attitudinal Congruence Between Citizens and Officials,” Western Political Quarterly, 26 (June, 1973), 209–223CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Verba, Sidney and Nie, Norman, Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality (New York: Harper and Row, 1972)Google Scholar.

³² This literature concerning the aggregation and transmission of preferences forms the heart of parties and pressure group theories and dates back to such influential works as Herring, Pendleton, The Politics of Democracy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1940)Google Scholar; Leiserson, Avery, Administrative Regulation: A Study of Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942)Google Scholar; Key, V. O. Jr., Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups (New York: Crowell, 1942)Google Scholar; and Truman, David, The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf, 1951)Google Scholar.