Legislative Apportionment and Fiscal Policy in the American States

Abstract

ELIBERATE changes in major public policy are seldom dramatic, tending to come instead in minor increments. Only in retrospect can these increments be totaled in a way that enables whole epochs of policy change to be clearly identified. The transition from a patronage to a merit public service was surely epochal, but the policy was changed gradually by minor increments. And so it has been in the widening of the franchise, the regulation of industry and commerce, the expansion of government's responsibility for the poor, municipal reform, and other major epochs in American politics. The incremental character of policy change has always provided a challenge to the political scientist. As he develops hypotheses asserting relationships between policy and policy results, he has great difficulty identifying and measuring specific policy changes and tracing them to particular changes in policy results. As a question of policy, the apportionment of state legislative bodies has been an exception to these generalizations for several reasons. First, apportionment is rather easy to measure. Second, there is no dearth of hypothesized relationships about the quality of the apportionment of state legislative bodies and the policy behavior of those bodies. Third, the change from general malapportionment to relative equity occurred, in policy-making terms, during a very short span of time. Between the Supreme Court's decision in 1962 and 1968 all significant malapportionment in state legislatures had virtually disappeared. Fourth, because reapportionment was more dramatic than most policy change, it is presumed to be easier to trace apportionment equalization to changes in policy outcome. For these reasons, almost all studies of policy results and their correlates include a measure of apportionment as a potential predictor. The results have not been impressive. The three best known measures of apportionment (Schubert-Press, Dauer-Kelsay, David-Eisenberg) have not been robust determinants of either expenditure or non-expenditure policy outcomes. Thomas Dye's well-known analysis of policy outcomes in the American states concludes that legislative apportionment is unimportant as an indicator of policy behavior. All of his political measures are similarly unimpressive as predictors: .. . the political choices of malapportioned legislatures are not noticeably different from policy