IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/apsrev/v84y1990i01p111-131_19.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • Budge, Ian
  • Hofferbert, Richard I.

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Budge, Ian & Hofferbert, Richard I., 1990. "Mandates and Policy Outputs: U.S. Party Platforms and Federal Expenditures," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 84(1), pages 111-131, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:84:y:1990:i:01:p:111-131_19
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0003055400191592/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kempf, Elisabeth & Luo, Mancy & Schäfer, Larissa & Tsoutsoura, Margarita, 2023. "Political ideology and international capital allocation," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 148(2), pages 150-173.
    2. Jennifer C. Cole & Phillip J. Ehret & David K. Sherman & Leaf Boven, 2022. "Social norms explain prioritization of climate policy," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 173(1), pages 1-21, July.
    3. Paul Chaney, 2015. "“Post-Feminist†Era of Social Investment and Territorial Welfare? Exploring the Issue Salience and Policy Framing of Child Care in U.K. Elections 1983-2011," SAGE Open, , vol. 5(1), pages 21582440155, February.
    4. Osterloh, Steffen, 2012. "Words speak louder than actions: The impact of politics on economic performance," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(3), pages 318-336.
    5. Brian Burgoon, 2013. "Inequality and anti-globalization backlash by political parties," European Union Politics, , vol. 14(3), pages 408-435, September.
    6. Jessica Hejny, 2018. "The Trump Administration and environmental policy: Reagan redux?," Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Springer;Association of Environmental Studies and Sciences, vol. 8(2), pages 197-211, June.
    7. Westermark, Andreas, 2004. "Extremism, campaigning and ambiguity," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 47(2), pages 421-452, May.
    8. Anja Prummer, 2016. "Spatial Advertisement in Political Campaigns," Working Papers 805, Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance.
    9. Koch Michael & Tkach Benjamin, 2012. "Deterring or Mobilizing? The Influence of Government Partisanship and Force on the Frequency, Lethality and Suicide Attacks of Terror Events," Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 18(2), pages 1-29, August.
    10. Mark J Wattier & Raymond Tatalovich, 2000. "Issue Publics, Mass Publics, and Agenda Setting: Environmentalism and Economics in Presidential Elections," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 18(1), pages 115-126, February.
    11. Andreas Schedler, 1998. "The Normative Force of Electoral Promises," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 10(2), pages 191-214, April.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:84:y:1990:i:01:p:111-131_19. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/psr .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.