Political power and the market for governors

Burton Abrams

Public Choice, 1981, vol. 37, issue 3, 529 pages

Abstract: The statistically insignificant results for the budget-power and veto-power variables suggest that, for some reason, these power characteristics are not particularly salable to consumers of governmental favors. It may simply be the case that political competition pushes governors to adopt median-voter public-policy outcomes despite the existence of discretionary budget and veto powers which permit them to behave otherwise. This suggests that discretionary powers may only be of value in those states where political competition is weak or where deviations from the wishes of the median voter are relatively costless (in terms of the value of votes lost) to the party or candidate in power. However, attempts to test this hypothesis using an interaction term between measures of inter-party competition and the governors budgetary and veto powers proved unsatisfactory. Perhaps, intra-party competition in ‘one-party’ states makes candidates just as responsive to the preferences of the median voter as are candidates in states with strong inter-party competition. Finally, the empirical results raise an interesting issue concerning the trend toward the ‘unbundling’ of gubernatorial races. Between 1960 and 1970, twelve states added (on average) eight points to their appointment power index while thirty-four states lost (on average) nearly seven points each. This decrease in gubernatorial appointment power (on average) suggests that data which merely report the growth in gubernatorial campaign spending during the sixties actually would underestimate the expansionary campaign-spending pressures at work. Copyright Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 1981

Date: 1981
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/BF00133749 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:37:y:1981:i:3:p:521-529

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/BF00133749

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().