Journal of Politics, 40, May, 1978

A large literature in comparative state politics has been devoted to debating whether interparty competition or malapportionment led to more liberal or conservative policy-making in the American states.  I argue that these debates are misplaced since Key's arguments on both interparty competition and apportionment were far more nuanced--and that there have been few systematic attempts to test the more theoretically rigorous hypotheses offered by Key.