Malapportionment Party Competition, and the Functional Distribution of Governmental Expenditures

Most students of American politics traditionally have argued that it is desirable that legislative apportionment systems conform as closely as possible to an ideal of numerical equality, and that it is desirable that major political parties actively compete for elective office. Admittedly this argument has been in large part only implicit, but, since most theoretical argument in political science has been implicit, this does not imply that apportionment or party competition have not been considered to be important by students of politics. Indeed several recent articles in professional journals have been published which seem to derive at least a portion of their appeal and raison d'être from a “demonstration” that students of politics have been guilty of the sin of credulity by holding these implicit beliefs.The tone of much of this work is aptly expressed by the title of a popularizing article by David Brady and Douglas Edmonds, “One Man, One Vote—So What?” Brady and Edmonds—after some extensive, but, unfornately not very discriminating statistical computations—concluded “that the whole Pandora's box of evil consequences which supposedly result from malapportionment—from right-to-work laws to not spending enough on school children—really has little to do with malapportionment.” Although somewhat more cautious in his approach, Thomas R. Dye reached the similar conclusion that “on the whole, the policy choices of malapportioned legislatures are not noticeably different from policy choices of well-apportioned legislatures.”