Strongly supportive results from each battery of tests indicate the validity of our annual, state-level measures of citizen and government ideology. Substantively, our measures reveal more temporal variation in state citizen ideology than is generally recognized. We extract seven explanations from the literatures on interest representation and organization ecology to account for variation in the dominance of institutions within interest communities.
Empirical support is found for five of the seven explanations.
We discuss the implications of these explanations for understanding how interest communities are constructed. The behavior of government agencies reflects democratic principles of equal treatment and efficiency as well as the more studied principle of responsiveness to elected political principals. The variance in IRS enforcement actions against individual and corporate taxpayers across states and time can be explained by measures reflecting equal treatment of taxpayers, enforcement efficiency, and responsiveness to elected officials. The odds of corporate versus individual audits increase with increased Democratic control over Congress and change with different presidential administrations, but not with changes in state-level partisanship. The odds also respond significantly to changes in the composition of the taxpaying district and revenue base, suggesting IRS responsiveness to equity and efficiency.