Politicians and Polity: Responsiveness in American Government

Abstract

Polity homogeneity and polity size have long been viewed as important variables in a politician's constraint set. Yet there has been no consensus as to how these factors influence the politician's behavior. James Madison argued for federal government on the grounds that smaller levels of government exploited minorities; he felt that minorities are represented only through coalition formation in larger levels of government. This argument is at odds with much of the current philosophy in which larger government is viewed as being less responsive. In addition, from those inquiries concerned with the median voter results we find that while there is general agreement that the structure of the polities' preferences (the degree of polity homogeneity) is an important element affecting a politician's behavior, there is no consensus as to the direction of the effect of polity size or polity homogeneity on the politician. Hence, the question would seem to be wide open for empirical investigation. However, while several attempts have been made to examine the median voter hypothesis for a single issue none have attempted to examine the effect of polity size and homogeneity on the politician's strategy choice in a multiple issue setting [9; 12]. In this paper the effects of constituency size and homogeneity on the political process are empirically examined. In Section II a review of the important trends in the political science and economics literature dealing with the politician and his polity is presented. The