Electoral competition, legislative balance, and American state welfare policy

This research integrates apparently contradictory portrayals of the role of political parties and electoral competition in American states' public policy making, From one view, political parties are essentially sincere, leading us to expect conservative or liberal dominance to yield changes in public policies that are in keeping with those Ideological leanings. Another set of evidence suggests that parties are for the most part strategic, tailoring their policy outputs to electoral circumstances, We argue that parties are neither wholly sincere nor wholly strategic In their policy positions, but that they blend sincere and strategic Impulses according to political conditions. We test this revised theory using cross-sectional state level data pooled over the years 1973-1992. Our results reveal the effects of party strength in government to be conditioned by electoral circumstances. For example, Democrats that dominate state legislatures but were elected in close races exert greater changes in welfare spending effort than Democrats with identical numbers of seats who were elected under less competitive elections. Thus both the number of seats and the difficulty of gaining them have policy consequences. The theory developed here provides a more consistent set of expectations regarding the effects of parties on policymaking than is otherwise drawn from existing research.