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References
For example, see Harold Hotelling, “Stability in Competition” ECONOMIC JOURNAL 39 (March, 1929): 41–57; Anthony Downs, AN ECONOMIC THEORY OF DEMOCRACY, (New York: Harper and Row, 1957); James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, THE CALCULUS OF CONSENT (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1962); and James M. Buchanan, “Democracy and Duopoly: A Comparison of Analytical Models,” AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW 58, No. 2 (May 1968): 322–331.
See, however, James L. Barr and Otto A. Davis, “An Elementary Political and Economic Theory of the Expenditures of Local Governments,” SOUTHERN ECONOMIC JOURNAL 33, No. 2 (October, 1966): 149–165.
Hotelling, OP. CIT. “
Arthur Smithies, “Optimum Location in Spatial Competition,” JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 49, No. 3 (June, 1941): 423–439.
Hotelling, OP. CIT., “ p. 54.
AN ECONOMIC THEORY OF DEMOCRACY and Gordon Tullock, THE POLITICS OF BUREAUCRACY (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1965).
For a discussion of the effect of potential entry on monopoly behavior see Howard Hines, “Effectiveness of ‘Entry’ by Already Established Firms,” QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS 71, No. 1 (February, 1957): 132–150.
For example, Nicos E. Devletoglou, “A Dissenting View of Duopoly and Spatial Competition,” ECONOMICA 32 n.s. (May, 1965): 140–160.
Hotelling, OP. CIT.; “; Gordon Tullock, “A Simple Algebraic Logrolling Model,” AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW 60, No. 3 (June, 1970): 719–726.
See Austin Ranney, “Parties in State Politics” in Herbert Jacob and Kenneth N. Vines (eds.), POLITICS IN THE AMERICAN STATES (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), pp. 61–99, for a complete discussion of his index. A recent study comparing the Ranney measure with four alternatives (using different time periods, offices, and measures of competition) found substantial agreement among all the indices and concluded that “... the degree of competitiveness among the states is relatively stable for the period 1914–63.” See Richard E. Zody and Norman R. Luttbeg, “An Evaluation of Various Measures of State Party Competition,” WESTERN POLITICAL QUARTERLY 21, No. 4 (December, 1968): 723–724.
Robert Piron has correctly observed that Ranney's index is particularly weak because it ignores intra-party conflict and legislator defection. However, neither of these two problems is of sufficient magnitude to require a re-classification of the long-term nature of a state's political structure. See Harmon Zeigler, “Interest Groups in the States” in Jacob and Vines, op. cit., pp. 101–147.
The distribution of the coefficient of variation may be described by the non-central t-distribution, but very little is known about the distribution of the DIFFERENCE between two coefficients of variation. See N. L. Johnson and B. L. Welch, “Applications of the Non-Central t Distribution”, BIOMETRIKA 31 (1939–40): 362–389; and A. Hald, STATISTICAL THEORY WITH ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS (Wiley: New York, 1952,) pp. 301–303.
We ignore the possibility that the size of the variation in two party states might be a measure for the “threshold barrier” which Devletoglou says precludes clustering; see his “A Dissenting View of Duopoly and Spatial Competition,” ECONOMICA 32 n.s. (May, 1965): 140–160, and his more recent “Threshold and Rationality,” KYKLOS 21, No. 4 (1968): 623–635.
Coefficients calculated from state Gini concentration ratios of before tax money income received by families in 1959 as reported in Ahmad Al-Samarrie and H. P. Miller, “State Differentials in Income Concentration,” AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW 57, No. 1 (March, 1967): 59–72.
The coefficients of variation of the 1959 incidence of poverty and ADC recipient rates were calculated with permission from data in Irene Lurie, AN ECONOMIC EVALUATION OF AID TO FAMILIES WITH DEPENDENT CHILDREN (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1968).
The coefficient of variation for Estimated Current Expenditures per Pupil (in Average Daily Attendance) for 1967–68 are 0.1843 and 0.1560 for the one and two party states, respectively. Coefficients were estimated from Kenneth A. Simon and W. Vance Grant, DIGEST OF EDUCATIONAL STATISTICS: 1968 EDITION, Washington, D.C.: Office of Education, U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1968), Table 72, p. 61.
Calculated from data in Frederic L. Pryor, PUBLIC EXPENDITURES IN COMMUNIST AND CAPITALIST NATIONS (Homewood, Illinois: Irwin, 1968), p. 145. The Western countries are Austria, Greece, Ireland, Italy, U.S.A., and West Germany. The Communist countries are Bulgaria, Czechoslavakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, U.S.S.R., and Yugoslavia.
Similar results for General Assistance are pictured in my “Welfare Payments and Work Incentive: Some Determinants of the Rates of General Assistance Payments,” JOURNAL OF HUMAN RESOURCES 3, No. 1 (Winter, 1968): 86–110, esp. p. 103.
This general result may hold within states as well as across states. For evidence that variation in ADC rates across Massachusetts cities is smaller than that for GA rates see Martha Dertheck, “Intercity Differences in Administration of the Public Assistance Program: The Case of Massachusetts” in James Q. Wilson (ed.), CITY POLITICS AND PUBLIC POLICY (New York: Wiley, 1968), pp. 243–266.
Additional information
The author is professor of economics at Oberlin College. He completed this paper while visiting the Department of Social and Economic Research, University of Glasgow. He is grateful for the comments of Christopher Green, Irene Lurie, Robert Piron, Gordon Tullock, Wayne Vroman, and Arthur W. Wright on an earlier draft. He wishes to express his appreciation to James Broadus for research assistance and to the Ford Foundation for financial support. The author is solely responsible for the views expressed in the paper.
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Kasper, H. On political competition, economic policy, and income maintenance programs. Public Choice 10, 1–19 (1971). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01718619
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01718619