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privileged access to a specialized policy domain, and enabling them to direct spending in
that domain towards key constituencies.
But to say that distributive theory fails to explain what city council committees do
is not to say that committees have no effect on policy. If committees are seen as
solutions to collective action problems, the policy effects of committees ought to be
visible in areas of city-wide concern, not in highly specialized policy domains. The case
of state aid to cities provides an excellent opportunity to measure the effects of
institutional organization in solving collective action problems. This is an account of
institutional formation that grows from experimental, case study, and formal theoretic
work on group problem solving. By treating legislatures as groups of people trying to
accomplish collective goals, we can gain important insights into the resulting institutional
structures.
Works Cited
Arrow, Kenneth J. 1963 (1951). Social Choice and Individual Values. Second ed. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Bledsoe, Timothy. 1993. Careers in City Politics: The Case for Urban Democracy.
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Bonacich, Phillip, Gerald H. Shure, James P. Kahan, and Robert J. Meeker. 1976.
Cooperation and Group Size in the N-Person Prisoners' Dilemma. Journal of
Conflict Resolution 20 (4):687-706.
Calvert, Randall L. 1995. Rational Actors, Equilibrium, and Social Institutions. In
Explaining Social Institutions, edited by J. Knight and I. Sened. Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press.
Chamberlain, John. 1974. Provision of Collective Goods As a Function of Group Size.
American Political Science Review 68 (2):707-716.
Cleveland, William S. 1979. Robust Locally Weighted Regression and Smoothing
Scatterplots. Journal of the American Statistical Association 74 (368):829-836.
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