Overlapping jurisdictions: Substitutes or complements?

This paper presents a simple model of the demand relationship between the activities undertaken by overlapping governments and uses the framework to estimate the relationship between municipal and county expenditures. The empirical results reveal a complementary relationship between county and city general expenditures; any public sector expansion effects of monopoly power at the county level will therefore be reinforced by greater municipal spending, further expanding the total size of the local public sector. On the other hand, changes in county police and roads expenditures appear to have no strong stable impact on municipal police and roads expenditures, respectively, providing no reinforcing or offsetting municipal spending responses to decisions at the county level.     

Education and mass belief systems: An extension and some new questions

Using the SRC/CPS's national election surveys from 1956 to 1976, this paper investigates the effect of education on consistency among the public's domestic policy opinions. Evidence from both gamma correlations and factor analysis indicates that education has neither a strong nor a linear effect on issue constraint over the 20 years covered by the data, for the lowest and the highest education strata consistently show the highest levels of constraint. We do not conclude, however, that education is unrelated to recognition of ideological concepts, for almost one-half of the lowest education stratum do not use liberal and conservative terms. We conclude that issue constraint does not directly translate into ideology and suggest some new directions that future research should take if we are to evaluate effectively the effect of education on opinion structuring.A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 1978 Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.