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⁶ See, for example, Cutright, Philips, ‘Political Structure, Economic Development and National Social Security Programs’, American Journal of Sociology, LXXX (1965), 537–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷ This is true of virtually all of the quantitative studies of policy mentioned.

⁸ There has been a tendency to generalize from findings in the American states in the mid–1960s to politics everywhere at every time. In fairness, however, other cross-sectional studies, e.g. Fried, ‘Policy and Politics in German Cities’, have offered some justifications for the generalizations.

⁹ Fried, Robert C., ‘Politics, Economics and Federalism: Aspects of Urban Government in Austria, Germany and Switzerland’, in Clark, Terry N., ed., Comparative Community Politics (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1974), pp. 313–50.Google Scholar

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¹⁴ In Scandinavia, this is indicated by the number of social programs initiated during the period of the Russian Revolution, many of which were explicit attempts to prevent the spread of those revolutionary ideas.

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²⁴ A further analysis using the elasticity of expenditures relative to GNP will provide a further test of the formulations of Herber and Wagner.

²⁵ The Keynesian analysis gave fluctuations in investment a prime place in determining business cycles, prior to the development of ‘active’ governments.

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³³ We are fully aware of the arguments against using tests of significance with annual timeseries. Annual figures do not always represent random samplings of all possible values of the variables over that period, but rather represent non-random aggregations of values for each entire year and thus constitute a population rather than a sample, or at best a non-random sample. In either case such figures would violate the assumptions of significance testing. However, in this and similar research, significance tests are used primarily to screen the correlations, not to make inferences about some universe of possible values of the variables.

³⁴ In the case of autocorrelation, the 0·01 level is more lenient than the 0·05 level because lack of significant autocorrelation is desired, meaning that the null hypothesis of no autocorrelation should be made difficult to reject.

³⁵ An alternative methodology, of course, would have been the t-test for independence of the correlation coefficients between each pair of countries, periods, etc. This was not attempted for this paper because of the sheer volume of further calculation required.

³⁶ The interpretations offered here even differ somewhat from some of our own previous work. See Peters, B. Guy, ‘Economic and Political Effects…,’;Google ScholarKlingman, , Social Change, Political Change and Public PolicyGoogle Scholar. These earlier studies used different sets of countries and operationalizations of concepts, but most importantly differ in the time periods used for analysis, which reinforces the claims of the conditional nature of the relationships.

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