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Over the past several decades many comparative studies of policy-making in the
American states were focused on identifying the factors that determine the differences in state
policy outputs (for example, Dye 1966; Cnudde and McCrone 1969; Fry and Winters 1970;
Lewis-Beck 1977; Dye 1978).
These studies examined the relationships between a variety of
system inputs and policy outputs, arguing that as certain inputs - such as the state’s tax base or
ideological preferences of the electorate - change there is a corresponding change in state policy
outputs such as spending levels on a certain program. These studies provided many interesting
findings, such as strong empirical evidence of the relationship between economic realities and
state policy choices, and provoked a number of intriguing questions. I argue they also shared
three characteristics that can be instructive in an attempt to understand current differences in
state policy choices such as state responses to welfare reform. In this paper, I apply these lessons
to understanding the different choices states made on the welfare reform plans required by the
national government in 1996. The primary tool used to identify any clear patterns of
institutional, economic, or political influence on welfare policy-making across the states is a
logistic regression analysis of the choices different states made on these welfare reform plans.
Lessons from Past Comparative Studies of State Policy-Making
The first characteristic these comparative studies of state policy-making shared was a
near obsession with judging the relative importance of “politics” and “economics” in the
determination of policy outcomes. “Politics” refers to characteristics of state political systems
such as party competition, voter participation, and Democratic or Republican control of the
state’s legislative and executive branches. “Economics” refers to the state’s economic condition
at the time of the policy-decision and is usually represented in these studies by measures of per
capita income, urbanization and industrialization. For example, the first such studies (for
Convention