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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Ian Budge  and
Richard I. Hofferbert
Ian Budge
Affiliation:
University of Essex
Richard I. Hofferbert
Affiliation:
State University of New York Binghamton
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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.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 84 , Issue 1 , March 1990 , pp. 111 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1990

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