Different preferences, different politics: A demand-and-structure explanation

Abstract

While Theodore Lowi's typology of issues and policies is widely agreed to distinguish different forms of legislative politics, his explanation for the categories has not been fully persuasive. This paper uses demand theory to analyze the different politics described by Lowi. Demand theory can illuminate many questions in legislative politics; it provides cardinal measures of valuation and methods of estimating those values statistically. Different distributions of political demand across legislators cause differences in legislative politics and institutional structure similar to those Lowi observed. Demand theory provides a more general theory of different types of politics and several testable differences from Lowi's typology. Evidence from case studies is analyzed and roll-call voting studies and the implications are compared with those of Lowi's theory. In several cases, where issues have become "ideological" and "redistributive" in the 1980s, the politics have changed, as the demand model predicts and Lowi's theory does not.

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