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example, Lockard 1959; 1963; Fenton 1966) argued that state political characteristics were the
most important determinants of state policies in education, welfare, health, highways, taxing, and
spending. Later studies (for example, Dye 1966; Dawson 1967; Boom and Haldorson 1973)
argued that the relationship between political factors and policy outcomes is spurious because
economic development within the state effects both political system characteristics and policy
choices. The use of more sophisticated statistical techniques added new vigor to this debate, but
unfortunately did not bring the discipline any closer to a final answer. The back and forth nature
of this debate led some scholars to “doubt that any ‘final test’ of this question is possible”
(Uslaner and Weber, p.131).
A second characteristic shared by many of these studies was a tendency to talk in the
language of determinism. For example, the Policy Studies Journal printed a series of articles in
1977 on this subject under the title “Symposium on Determinants of Public Policy.” Thomas
Dye titled his introductory article for the Symposium, “Politics Versus Economics: the
Development of the Literature on Policy Determination.” In these studies, environmental factors,
be they political or economic, are regarded as the primary causes of state policy-making. Rarely
do any of these studies mention individual decision-makers, much less the interaction between
these environmental factors and the human beings charged with making policy-decisions. The
third characteristic of these studies was the use of expenditure data or measures derived from
expenditure data (e.g., effort, or welfare spending per capita) to represent state policy choices.
For example, these studies normally assumed that the states which spent more on their AFDC
programs had more liberal welfare policies than the states that spent less. The identification of
these characteristics reveals a number of lessons that have implications for this comparative
study of welfare reform choices made in the states. First, the back and forth nature of the politics
versus economics debate suggests that scholars of the policy process should focus their efforts on
Convention