{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.009791921664626682, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.462450592885376, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Comment on Wright's Analysis

GERALD WRIGHT'S RECONSIDERATION of the relationship between interparty competition and state welfare policies offers a clear demonstration of the advantages to be gained by a theoretically guided departure from the standard linear assumption underlying most comparative research on state policy. His work improves upon my earlier treatment of the subject in two primary ways: he provides an explicit theoretical justification of the decision to apply a nonlinear function to the competition-welfare relationship among the states; and his analysis is based upon a careful choice of the class of non-linear functions most likely to provide an appropriate test for his theoretical specification of the form of that relationship. His paper thus constitutes a more direct contribution to theory-building than my own work, which was explicitly exploratory in nature. His application of a linear transformation to the Pfeiffer index to bring it into a lower range produces a much stronger transformation when values on the index are transformed by their logarithms. This stronger transformation is consistent with his expectation of rather large increases in the rate of change of the function describing the competition-welfare policy relationship as the level of competition increases. As the title of his piece suggests, this seemingly slight difference in choice of nonlinear function results in rather large increases in the amount of variance explained in the dependent variables. Consequently I welcome his work for its theoretical and methodological contribution to our understanding of the relationship