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The Public as Thermostat: Dynamics of Preferences for Spending
Abstract
Theory: Democratic accountability requires that the public be reasonably well-informed about what policymakers actually do. Such a public would adjust its preferences for ''more'' or ''less'' policy in response to policy outputs themselves. In effect, the public would behave like a thermostat; when the actual policy ''temperature'' differs from the preferred policy temperature, the public would send a signal to adjust policy accordingly, and once sufficiently adjusted, the signal would stop. Hypotheses: In domains where policy is clearly defined and salient to the public, changes in the public's preferences for more policy activity are negatively related to changes in policy. Methods: A thermostatic model of American public preferences for spending on defense and a set of five social programs is developed and then tested using time series regression analysis. Results: Changes in public preferences for more spending reflect changes in both the preferred levels of spending and spending decisions themselves. Most importantly, changes in preferences are negatively related to spending decisions, whereby the public adjusts its preferences for more spending downward (upward) when appropriations increase (decrease). Thus, consistent with the Eastonian model, policy outputs do ''feed back'' on public inputs, at least in the defense spending domain and across a set of social spending domains.
... The second, opposing set of mechanisms emerge principally from research on the effects of previous financial crises and downturns, and include: (i) an increase in personal and public financial strain fostering austerity, self-interest and resentment (Uunk & van Oorschot, 2019;Burchardt, 2020;Roosma, 2020); and (ii) thermostatic effects, by which public attitudes become less generous in response to increasingly generous government policy (Wlezien, 1995). ...
... First, individual and societal financial strain and insecurity can foster austerity, selfinterest and resentment (Hoggett et al., 2013;Uunk & van Oorschot, 2019;Burchardt, 2020;Roosma, 2020). Second, previous research has shown that when policy becomes substantially more generous (for example when public spending in a given area increases), public attitudes move thermostatically in favour of increasing austerity (Wlezien, 1995). Therefore, as welfare support became more generous during the pandemic, the public's appetite for such support may have correspondingly declined (Curtice et al., 2020). ...
... An alternative explanation for attitudinal stability in the face of the pandemic is that mechanisms which would tend to make welfare attitudes more generous (an increase in the perceived deservingness of claimants, an expansion in indirect and direct experience of welfare, an increase in generalised solidarity) were equally matched by countervailing mechanisms making attitudes less generous: principally financial strain (Hoggett et al., 2013;Uunk & van Oorschot, 2019) and thermostatic responses (Wlezien, 1995;Curtice et al., 2020). ...
COVID-19 had the potential to dramatically increase public support for welfare. It was a time of apparent increased solidarity, of apparently deserving claimants, and of increasingly widespread exposure to the benefits system. However, there are also reasons to expect the opposite effect: an increase in financial strain fostering austerity and self-interest, and thermostatic responses to increasing welfare generosity. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the pandemic on attitudes towards working-age unemployment benefits in the UK using a unique combination of data sources: (i) temporally fine-grained data on attitudinal change over the course of the pandemic; and (ii) a novel nationally representative survey contrasting attitudes towards pandemic-era and pre-pandemic claimants (including analysis of free-text responses). Our results show that the pandemic prompted little change in UK welfare attitudes. However, we also find that COVID-era unemployment claimants were perceived as substantially more deserving than those claiming prior to the pandemic. This contrast suggests a strong degree of 'COVID exceptionalism'-with COVID claimants seen as categorically different from conventional claimants, muting the effect of the pandemic on welfare attitudes overall.
... Studies of "policy congruence" evaluate whether citizens' and politicians' preferences are aligned but do not tell whether mass preferences are translated into policies implemented by a government, or even whether political parties are punished for not representing public preferences in their policy implementation. A second, perhaps even more influential, approach considers "dynamic representation," the process by which policy makers adjust policy to align with shifting public preferences (Enns 2022;Erikson et al. 2002;Stimson et al. 1995;Wlezien 1995). Dynamic representation can reflect two underlying processes: either the process of governments responding directly to citizens' shifting policy preferences ("policy accommodation") or the process of electorates changing the government when the political parties in charge are not representing mass preferences ("electoral turnover") (Bartle, Bosch, and Orriols 2020). ...
... First, it offers a direct assessment of the coherence (or lack thereof) of Uruguayan policy preferences. Second, if, as we expect, we estimate policy mood, it will provide a time-series measure that we can use to test whether opinion change is systematic and whether it responds thermostatically (Wlezien 1995), as it does in advanced industrial countries. Third, this measure is important as it can be used for future research to further evaluate the causes and consequences of shifts in Uruguayan public opinion. ...
... Second, policy change tends to overshoot the public's ideal point, leading public attitudes to change course. Wlezien (1995) refers to this as "thermostatic" responsiveness. 5 Like a person who turns on the air conditioner when it's hot, only to turn down the air conditioner when the room gets too cold, a government may implement more liberal policies in response to shifting public opinion, and then, when the policy shift is too great and the electorate moves to the conservative side, the government delivers more conservative policies. ...
... Consequently, our theoretical intuitions and empirical analyses focus on the main parties on the left and the right within each country. 1 The arguments in this paper are related to several long-standing debates in political science. They are generally related to broad discussions about whether parties should be understood as vote-seeking or policy-seeking (Müller and Strøm 1999;Strøm 1990), the distinction between 'swing' voters and 'core' voters (Aldrich 1983;Cox 2009;Cox and McCubbins 1986;Dixit and Londregan 1996;Lindbeck and Weibull 1987;Stokes et al. 2013), the reciprocal relationship between voters and parties (Adams, Merrill, and Grofman 2005a;Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002), and the dynamic nature of party competition and democratic representation (Adams, Haupt, and Stoll 2009;Adams and Somer-Topcu 2009b;Adams et al. 2004;Soroka and Wlezien 2010;Stimson, MacKuen, and Erikson 1995;Wlezien 1995). ...
... Other influential literature argues that the median voter does matter, but not in the manner we emphasize in this paper. For example, the importance of the median voter is implicit in the influential Thermostatic Model, which links public opinion and policy (Soroka and Wlezien 2010;Wlezien 1995), but our main contributionwhich is that the uncertainty around estimates of the median voter's position matters greatly to main partiesis missing from this research: there is little consideration of the uncertainty around the thermostatic signal, and information only matters to responsiveness (the public acquires and processes information about policy, and adjusts its preferences accordingly). ...
... These findings also have important implications for long-standing debates about how political parties operate, the nature of party competition, and democratic responsiveness. In particular, our argument and results combine the ideas that are captured by models of dynamic representationsuch as the 'thermostatic' model proposed by (Wlezien 1995) with the idea that parties are autonomous organizations that pursue their own partisan policy goals. 20 As mentioned above, our results do not confirm Somer-Topcu (2009): once uncertainty is taken into consideration, the effects of the previous election do not dissipate after about 32 months. ...
Political parties face a crucial trade-off between electoral and partisan goals: should they put electoral goals first, pursuing the policies they think will win them the most votes in the next election, or should they put partisan goals first, pursuing the policies their members, activists, and most loyal voters prefer? In this paper we argue that main political parties make different choices depending on the information environment they are in. They have strong incentives to follow the median voter when the median voter's position is well known, but when there is more uncertainty they have strong incentives to adopt policies they prefer for partisan reasons, since uncertainty makes party leaders more willing to bet that the party's preferred policies are also vote winners. We develop an empirical analysis of how the main parties on the left and the right in twenty democracies have changed their platforms from election to election since the 1960s.
... Furthermore, conceptual decisions could reasonably be made differently. For example, we have categorized attitudes toward defense spending as policy attitudes, following convention (Hurwitz and Peffley 1987;Wlezien 1995). If these were interpreted as indicating general postures toward the role of the military in foreign policy instead, the results on the lack of opinion change at higher levels of German belief systems would be more mixed. ...
... Given the importance of this issue in the German Zeitenwende debate and in light of the state of the German armed forces, it is not impossible that military spending will acquire such symbolism. This reading conflicts, however, with existing evidence of the context dependence of these attitudes (Wlezien 1995), and even if we assigned them posturelike status, the large change in this one case would be offset by the evidence of stability of the other postures. Even then, a balanced assessment of all the available evidence seems to amount to rejecting the thesis of a turning point at the level of public opinion. ...
... Our findings strike the same chord. The changes in opinion that we do find are quite compatible with notions of a rational public (Page and Shapiro 1992) that reacts like a thermostat to changes in its information environment (Wlezien 1995). We also find exactly the pattern in core postures that one would theoretically expect-they turn out to be stable across contexts. ...
This paper addresses the question of whether Russia's invasion of Ukraine led to a turning point (Zeitenwende) in public opinion on foreign and defense policy in Germany. To this end, we provide a theoretical analysis of how the concept of turning point can be applied to public opinion. We identify the durability of the change in attitudes as well as its significance as necessary conditions to speak of a turning point. In the remainder of the paper, we focus on the argument that changes in different types of orientations are significant to different degrees. Change in core postures is more significant than change in policy attitudes; change in attitudes thematically distant from the Russian invasion is more significant than change in attitudes directly related to the event. Empirically, we present a panel data analysis of attitude change triggered by the Russian invasion. Analysis of data from several waves of the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) panel survey collected before the invasion (2017-2021) and in two waves after (May and October 2022) shows that there were sizable shifts in policy attitudes directly related to the event. Postures remained essentially unchanged, as did thematically distant attitudes. We conclude that there has been no turning point at the level of public opinion (yet).
... They argue public opinion is fluid with people changing from supporting an issue to opposing it back again to supporting it easily. They use the metaphor of a thermostat to describe the rising and falling of public support for an issue (Soroka & Wlezien, 2010;Wlezien, 1995). Policymakers adjust their responses based on public opinion, while public opinion shifts as a response to policy changes which result in either more spending or spending cuts depending on public perspectives on an issue (Soroka & Wlezien, 2010). ...
... Policymakers adjust their responses based on public opinion, while public opinion shifts as a response to policy changes which result in either more spending or spending cuts depending on public perspectives on an issue (Soroka & Wlezien, 2010). Once the public believes the level of spending is too high (liberal) or too low (conservative), public opinion will often shift to the opposite side of the spectrum (Wlezien, 1995). ...
Canadian public opinion surveys from five Canadian polling firms in 29 separate surveys from 2007 to 2021 are used to measure changes in belief in anthropogenic climate change in Canada. By applying Stimson’s (1991) Dyad Ratio Algorithm to the surveys an index is created which shows a single trend line tracking belief in climate change over time. Belief in climate change declined from 2007 to 2011, then gradually increased to 2021. The research note concludes by suggesting there is an opportunity in Canada for action to address climate change which will continue to solve the problem even when public interest once again declines.ResuméVingt-huit sondages de l’opinion publique canadienne emmenée par cinq maisons de sondages canadiens de 2007 à 2019 sont utilisés pour mesurer le changement de la croyance au changement climatique anthropique au Canada. En appliquant l'Algorithme du rapport dyadique de Stimson (1991) aux sondages, on crée un index montrant une unique ligne de tendance suivant l'évolution de la croyance au changement climatique au fil du temps. De 2007 à 2011, la croyance au changement climatique a diminué, suivie d’une augmentation graduelle jusqu’en 2018. La conclusion de l'article de recherche suggère qu’il y a des opportunités au Canada pour agir contre le changement climatique et qu'ils continueront à résoudre le problème même si l'opinion publique s'en désintéresse.Key Words: Canada, public opinion and public policy, belief in climate changeMots-clés : Canada, opinion publique et les politiques publique, croyance dans le changement climatique
... This finding raises the question of how politicians can learn and respond so rapidly to changes in public mood. In traditional dynamic representation models (Soroka and Wlezien 2010;Stimson, Mackuen, and Erikson 1995;Wlezien 1995), public policy adjusts to shifts in aggregate public opinion over much longer periods of time, typically years, and politicians learn about changes in public opinion through tools that require careful analysis, such as opinion polls (Druckman and Jacobs 2006), expert consensus (Stimson, Mackuen, and Erikson 1995), or by recording and analyzing information (Henderson et al. 2021). These approaches to detecting changes in public opinion do not seem applicable to the social media setting because they are impractical in settings in which new information is highly decentralized and spreads in minutes (Cagé, Hervé, and Viaud 2020). ...
... While recognizing that politicians cannot directly know the preferences of the public, this theory proposes that all politicians have access to a "consensus view" about the direction of change in preferences which is produced by a community of opinion leaders, including politicians, journalists, and academics. In a similar spirit, thermostatic models of public opinion (Wlezien 1995(Wlezien , 2004 assume that politicians are aware of directional changes in aggregate public opinion. ...
This article studies how politicians react to feedback from citizens on social media. We use a reinforcement-learning framework to model how politicians respond to citizens' positive feedback by increasing attention to better received issues and allow feedback to vary depending on politicians' gender. To test the model, we collect 1.5 million tweets published by Spanish MPs over 3 years, identify gender-issue tweets using a deep-learning algorithm (BERT) and measure feedback using retweets and likes. We find that citizens provide more positive feedback to female politicians for writing about gender, and that this contributes to their specialization in gender issues. The analysis of mechanisms suggests that female politicians receive more positive feedback because they are treated differently by citizens. To conclude, we discuss implications for representation, misperceptions, and polarization.
This article is under a Creative Commons licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
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... Previous research provides important insights into citizen preferences for governmental spending: the coherence of mass spending preferences (e.g., Jacoby, 1994); the micro-level determinants of spending preferences (e.g., Eismeier, 1982;Rudolph & Evans, 2005); the causes and consequences of specific welfare spending preferences (e.g., Gingrich & Ansell, 2012;Hausermann et al., 2019;Rehm, 2011); response to spending (e.g., Wlezien, 1995;Soroka & Wlezien, 2010); trade-offs between spending, deficits, and taxes (e.g., Hansen, 1998;Busemeyer & Garritzmann, 2017;Hausermann et al., 2019;Tuxhorn et al., 2021;Bremer and Burgisser, 2022a) and between individual spending domains (e.g., Busemeyer et al., 2018;Bremer and Burgisser, 2022b). ...
... We calculated aggregate-level preferences for each format. For the traditional items, this means subtracting the percentage saying they want less spending from the percentage saying they want more, i.e., "net support" for spending (Wlezien, 1995). For data from the conjoint experiment, we produce similar measures by using individuals' preferred budgets and the resulting distribution of preferred spending levels over both choice tasks. ...
Governmental budgets and the priorities they reflect are the subjects of recurring political debate. Research on political representation typically focuses on relative spending preferences, mostly in isolated domains that are unconstrained, and so provides only limited information about people’s preferences. Recent survey work considers the effects of asking about absolute spending levels in different substantive areas and in the face of revenue constraints. No studies do all three, though two get close, and provide more fine-grained measures of preferences for spending change. We follow their lead but in a more general way, offering budget profiles that include increases as well as decreases in spending levels, embedded in a conjoint experiment in Sweden. Our results reveal that people appear to hold preferences on specific magnitudes of spending change, that budgetary constraints matter, and the effects of increases and decreases in spending are not symmetrical. Although the implied preferences for spending are similar in direction to expressed relative preferences that are unconstrained, the levels of support across domains are very different. The findings have implications for assessments of opinion representation, as inferences about the responsiveness of policy to preferences – and the congruence between them – differ depending on measurement of the latter.
Keywords: relative preferences, preferred spending levels, constrained preferences, increases and decreases, conjoint experiments
... Does it amplify or alter underlying preferences? Some preferences vary depending on recently salient events (Zaller 1992), contributing to a so-called thermostatic response where public opinion and policy change in response to each other (Wlezien 1995), a relationship Jennings (2009) finds to influence the UK asylum system. 5 However, some preferences are less mutable and more deeply held, particularly when they involve consequential future choices such as voting (Krosnick and Brannon 1993). ...
... As Freeman (1994) previously noted, the UK system is responsive to public opinion, though I argue that it is not unique in this. My findings therefore strengthen the case for including asylum policy together with immigration more broadly (Lahav 2004), defence spending (Wlezien 1995), environmental protection (Bromley-Trujillo and Poe 2020), and others (Burstein 2003) as policies which are responsive to public opinion, particularly when accounting for salience as well as preferences. Evidence of policy responding to public opinion, and a lack of evidence for Freeman's 'policy gap ' (1995), suggests that democratic policymaking is at least somewhat attentive to the demands of the electorate. ...
What explains different rates of positive asylum decisions in Western democracies? Legislators and bureaucrats respond to public preferences on immigration, though studies have not accounted for salience amplifying preferences. Using autoregressive models, I find relationships between salience, preferences, and asylum recognition rates in Germany and the UK, indicating that asylum administration responds to public opinion. High salience and more open immigration preferences are associated with increased asylum recognition rates in Germany, while lower rates in the UK follow high salience and restrictive preferences. Applications rejected under these adverse conditions precede increases in successful appeals, suggesting political pressure or their own preferences lead bureaucratic actors to reduce rates in the UK. These results do not support lobbying or a culture of disbelief as influences on immigration policies. Rather, they raise questions about Western democracies’ adherence to an international rules-based asylum system and highlight mechanisms by which policy responds to public opinion.
... Although a variety of ingredients shape policy preferences, the status quo as well as an initial value in agenda setting are central to understanding how the public thinks about whether it wants more or less of a policy (Kingdon, 1984;Page & Shapiro, 1983;Wliezen's, 1995). A common thread running through these studies is that policy preferences are often biased towards the status quo, an empirical regularity at the macro-level consistent with a micro-level focus on anchoring. ...
... A common thread running through these studies is that policy preferences are often biased towards the status quo, an empirical regularity at the macro-level consistent with a micro-level focus on anchoring. For instance, an assumption behind Wliezen (1995)thermostatic model is that the public adjusts its preferences for spending, more or less, in relative opposition to a shift in the status quo. In the absence of a status quo, anchoring may also help illuminate the cognitive foundations that facilitate agenda setting. ...
Public policy is often about numbers that affect people’s lives in fundamental ways. Given the central importance of numbers, we examine anchoring , a heuristic in which people are influenced by an initial number in expressing a preference. Across a series of experiments and three unique surveys, we find evidence of anchoring effects, but not uniformly so. In contrast to experiments in psychology and behavioral economics, we find no evidence that irrelevant or arbitrary anchors shape policy preferences. Yet, when provided politically relevant anchors that clearly correspond to the policy proposal, we find evidence of strong effects, even in the face of party cues or in the absence of a status quo policy point. Taken together, our results demonstrate that there is a psychological explanation for why the status quo occupies a powerful position in policy debates as well as why agenda setting is so influential.
... The public regularly uses available policy information to update its opinions. Scholarship has shown that policy change has a robust statistical effect on the public's preferences in salient issue domains (Wlezien 1995;Jennings 2009), which reflects the public using information about policy itself. 1 The public's use of available outcomes information is not well understood, as studies have yielded seemingly contradictory results. Some have found outcomes' statistical effect on public opinion to be robust, which suggests that the public uses information about outcomes to update its opinions (Egan and Mullin 2012;Kim et al. 2020). ...
... The thermostatic literature finds that public opinion and policy have a reciprocal relationship; policy change moves public opinion which then prompts more policy change, creating a process that feeds back on itself. The thermostatic literature does not include outcomes as part of this dynamic (Wlezien 1995;Wlezien 2004;Jennings 2009;Soroka and Wlezien 2010). ...
This article advances a theory that brings real-world outcomes into our current understanding of the dynamic relationship between public opinion and policy. It examines a vital public good – air pollution remediation in 319 American localities – and estimates a dynamic model of relationships among three key variables: public opinion, policy, and air pollution outcomes. The analysis focuses on both public opinion and air pollution outcomes as dependent variables. I find that public opinion reacts to changes in statewide policy and local air pollution, which suggests the public forms its opinions with whatever reliable information is most readily available. I also find that local public opinion’s impact on local air pollution is substantively meaningful on timescales smaller than 5 years, indicating that the additional policy effort prompted by public opinion change is sufficient to yield tangible real-world outcomes even in the short term.
... Finkel and Ernst (2005) exposed spin tactics in U.S. politics -by selectively using symbols and rhetoric, leaders manipulated public opinion to their benefit. Wlezien (1995) found that British parties relied more on cultural appeals than policy plans when campaigning. Cultural caricatures of opponents substituted for substantive debate. ...
This paper examines the complex interrelationship between cultural forces and political attitudes and behaviors. Through an extensive literature review, expert interviews, and rigorous content analysis, the research illuminates how cultural values, beliefs, and norms fundamentally shape individuals' political ideologies, policy preferences, partisan affiliations, civic engagement, and voting patterns. Findings demonstrate adherence to traditional cultural values like religiosity and nationalism predicts conservative political orientations, while progressive values like secularism and multiculturalism predict liberal orientations. The study also uncovers how politicians and media strategically exploit cultural symbols and narratives to frame issues and manipulate public opinion to their advantage. Prevailing cultural attitudes regarding duties and efficacy as citizens are shown to influence voter turnout and election outcomes. Promising reforms to address cultural biases include increasing access to diverse perspectives and critical civic education, promoting inclusive institutions and cross-cultural dialogue, and fostering political literacy. This research underscores the need for democratic processes and policies attuned to diverse cultural standpoints to pursue shared interests equitably. It concludes that comprehending the cultural antecedents of political behaviors and interpretations is essential for just, effective governance in pluralistic societies.
... Another potential mechanism might involve "thermostatic politics" theory (Wlezien 1995) wherein, after eight years of relatively liberal public policymaking, for example, a segment of the public shifts toward the party that advocates for more conservative public policymaking (see also Chatterjee and Eyigungor 2020). Governing elites' drift away from voters' policy preferences also helps explain the "cost of ruling" effect-i.e., the tendency for governing parties to lose political support over time (e.g., see Wlezien 2017). ...
Presidential elections are arguably the most consequential recurring political event in the United States. Understanding the factors that determine their outcomes, therefore, is of substantial importance. One proposed factor pertains to candidates’ incumbency status, yet its nature is complex and difficult to study with observational data. In particular, the individual-level mechanisms underlying incumbency effects remain surprisingly unclear. This Letter proposes many citizens generally believe that, ceteris paribus, presidents should be afforded two terms. Existence of such a norm implies that incumbency status possesses an inherent effect, operating independent of other mechanisms stemming from incumbency. A large, pre-registered survey experiment is employed to isolate incumbency status, finding evidence for a one-term advantage and clarifying the nature of the two-term disadvantage. The study thus uncovers a micro-foundational mechanism underlying incumbent-party performance in presidential elections. Finally, analyses of panel data explore which voters may be systematically inclined to vote based upon incumbency status.
... We focus here on the interactions between news coverage, budgetary policy, and public preferences on defense, welfare, and health spending in the United States (US). Our analysis draws on the research on "thermostatic responsiveness" (e.g. , Jennings 2009;Pacheco 2013;Soroka and Wlezien 2010;Wlezien 1995). This work finds that policy feeds back negatively on the public's relative preferences, for example, if the public wants more spending on defense and the government provides more spending, then the public adjusts its preference for more spending downward, other things being equal. ...
Mass media are often portrayed as a having large effects in democratic politics. Media content is not simply an exogenous influence on publics and policymakers, however. There is reason to think that this content reflects publics and politics as much – if not more – than it affects them. This letter examines those possibilities, focusing on interactions between news coverage, budgetary policy, and public preferences in the defense, welfare, and health care domains in the United States. Results indicate that media play a largely reflective role. Taking this role into account, we suggest, leads to a fundamentally different perspective on how media content matters in politics.
... And firms routinely commit to social responsibility initiatives, aimed at improving their public image in order to slow the pressure for regulation. However, when public opinion begins to coalesce around policy issues and regulatory initiatives (especially when the process is rapid), we observe considerable momentum for policy change (Wlezien, 1995;Soroka & Wleizien 2010;Stimson, 2015). ...
Unlabelled:
Can international organizations (IOs) influence attitudes about regulating "Big Tech?" Recent tech sector activity engenders multiple concerns, including the appropriate use of user data and monopolistic business practices. IOs have entered the debate, advocating for increased regulations to protect digital privacy and often framing the issue as a threat to fundamental human rights. Does this advocacy matter? We hypothesize individuals that score high on measures of internationalism will respond positively to calls for increased regulation that come from IOs and INGOs. We further predict Liberals and Democrats will be more receptive to IO and NGO messaging, especially when it emphasizes human rights, while Conservatives and Republicans will be more receptive to messaging from domestic institutions that emphasize antitrust actions. To assess these arguments, we fielded a nationally-representative survey experiment in the U.S. in July 2021 that varied the source and framing of a message about the dangers posed by tech firms, then asked respondents about support for increased regulation. The average treatment effect of international sources is largest for respondents who score high on an index of internationalism and for respondents on the left of the political spectrum. Contrary to expectations, we found few significant differences across human rights and anti-trust framings. Our results suggest the ability of IOs to influence attitudes about tech regulation may be limited in an era of polarization, but that individuals who value multilateralism may still be influenced by IO campaigns.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11558-023-09490-8.
... In populism, anti-elitism is understood as a broader scepticism about the ruling class rather than a simple antiestablishment sentiment. Therefore, we cannot consider a thermostatic notion (Wlezien, 1995): when an anti-elitist candidate or party wins the election and occupies an executive office, then these anti-elitist attitudes of their voters do not evaporate into thin air but only shift their focus to a broader sense of elite, such as NGOs, liberal media or multinational companies. Second, the people-centrism dimension considers the people as homogenous and virtuous, and suppressed by the elites. ...
While scholarship often assumes that strong leaders and charismatic leadership play an important role in the emergence of populist politics, research has missed a closer exploration of charisma attribution to populists. Addressing this charismatic leadership hypothesis requires populism and charisma to be analysed from the followers’ perspective. This article takes a unique look at the social-psychological dynamics behind populism. Using quantitative survey data that was collected from Hungarian voters ( N = 1200), this article examines the relationship between populist attitudes as follower characteristics in modern politics and charisma attribution. To reveal how a populist worldview can affect the follower’s expectations and perceptions, we break charisma attribution down into three phases: (1) the general hunger for charisma (the romance of leadership); (2) perceptions of charismatic behaviour of the top candidates in the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary elections (i.e., Viktor Orbán and Péter Márki-Zay); and (3) emotional attachment to these leaders. Our findings show that populism makes people more hungry for charisma and more sensitive to recognising charismatic behaviour but does not necessarily create an emotional bond with specific leaders. This article also sheds light on some directions of future research to explore other distinctive characteristics of populist followers that can influence social constructions of charismatic leadership. The limitations and implications are also discussed.
... Finally, this "reverse backlash effect" may also be conceptualised as a form of thermostatic public opinion. Rather than the thermostat measuring feeling towards particular policies (Wlezien, 1995), it would be towards the direction and state of the party system and societal norms regarding what constitutes an acceptable political opinion. ...
What is the relationship between the electoral success of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) and public attitudes toward immigration? Previous research suggests that PRRP success can lead to more negative attitudes due to the breaking down of anti-prejudice norms and more prominent anti-immigration party cues. However, we argue that greater PRRP success could have a positive relationship with immigration attitudes, reflecting negative partisanship, polarisation, and a desire to re-emphasise anti-prejudice norms, which we call a "reverse backlash effect". Using the best available electoral and public opinion data across the last thirty years in 24 European countries, our TSCS analyses show the predominance of such "reverse backlash effects" across several operationalisations of PRRP success. Our argument has important consequences for the understanding of possible PRRP effects on public opinion, as well as attitudinal formation via party cueing and social norms more generally.
... Ideology and values, in turn are gauged empirically by looking at how public opinion plays a role in the diffusion or modification of policies. Wlezien (1995), for instances, conceives a model of public responsiveness in which citizens behave like a thermostat that sends a signal to government when policy deviates from their preference so that such policy can change accordingly. Supposedly, critical public opinion ceases once policy is in congruence with citizen demand. ...
This article argues that, like many in Southeast Asia, the Philippine government's COVID-19 response was marked by policy experimentation and incremental adaptation, having been caught off-guard by the pandemic. Examining 16,281 government press releases related to COVID-19 issued by the Philippine News Agency between February 2020 and April 2021, we find that in its policy narratives the government panders initially to citizen demand, highlighting social amelioration as a pandemic strategy. However, as citizens’ economic anxiety further intensifies, the government's framing of the crisis response becomes pragmatic and turns towards promoting mass inoculation, ostensibly in a bid to convince citizens to choose health over short-term palliative economic measures. The findings nuance policymaking in an illiberal democracy, beyond the conventional populist description of seeking easy solutions or spectacularizing crisis response.
... Thirdly, our results corroborate prior literature in international relations suggesting that reciprocity may not be as important a determinant of public support for public goods provision as collective action theory suggests Strict regulation is meaningful for Swiss aggregate welfare, as MNEs make up about 35 to 42 per cent of Swiss corporate tax income and approximately 11 per cent of Swiss employment (Walser and Bischofberger 2013). 7 Generally, a large body of research corroborates the notion that public opinion matters in shaping policy debates and particularly the scope and form of political mandates for government action, and hence policy makers' decisions (Burstein 2003;Page and Shapiro 1983;Wlezien 1995). Policy processes appear to be responsive to both short-and long-term shifts in public opinion (Bakaki, Böhmelt and Ward 2020;Schaffer, Oehl and Bernauer 2021). ...
Vastly increased transnational business activity in recent decades has been accompanied by controversy over how to cope with its social and environmental impacts. The most prominent policy response thus far consists of international guidelines. We investigate to what extent and why citizens in a high-income country are willing to restrain companies to improve environmental and social conditions in other countries. Exploiting a real-world referendum in Switzerland, we use choice and vignette experiments with a representative sample of voters ( N = 3,010) to study public demand for such regulation. Our results show that citizens prefer strict and unilateral rules (with a substantial variation of preferences by general social and environmental concern) while correctly assessing their consequences. Moreover, exposure to international norms increases demand for regulation. These findings highlight that democratic accountability can be a mechanism that motivates states to contribute to collective goods even if not in their economic interest and that awareness of relevant international norms among citizens can enhance this mechanism.
... Ideology and values, in turn are gauged empirically by looking at how public opinion plays a role in the diffusion or modification of policies. Wlezien (1995), for instances, conceives a model of public responsiveness in which citizens behave like a thermostat that sends a signal to government when policy deviates from their preference so that such policy can change accordingly. Supposedly, critical public opinion ceases once policy is in congruence with citizen demand. ...
This paper argues that, like many in Southeast Asia, government’s COVID19 response was marked by policy experimentation and incremental adaptation, having been caught by the pandemic off-guard. Examining 16,281 government press statements related to COVID 19 issued by the Philippine News Agency between February 2020 and April 2021, we find that in its policy narratives government panders initially to citizen demand, highlighting social amelioration as a pandemic strategy. However, as citizens’ economic anxiety further intensifies, government’s framing of crisis response becomes pragmatic and turns toward promoting mass inoculation, ostensibly in a bid to convince citizens to choose health over short-term palliative economic measures. The findings nuance policymaking in an illiberal democracy, beyond the conventional populist description of seeking easy solutions or spectacularizing crisis response.
... Duverger's moderates decide the outcome of elections: thermostat-like, they lean one way in one election and the opposite way in another, depending on a number of factors. One is how far policy strays to the Right or the Left from the "geometric spot" (Budge 2019; Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002;Soroka and Wlezien 2009;Wlezien 1995Wlezien , 2017. Chance also plays a part (Budge 2019; Heggen and Cuzán 2022a). ...
In “In Laws of Politics and How to Establish Them,” Erik Weber contends that my arguments for the existence of “five laws of politics” are “inconclusive.” Although the “empirical evidence is impressive,” he avers, the “underlying social mechanisms” responsible for the adduced relationships are missing. Without it, he adds, no empirical relationship rises to the special status of a “law” of politics. Helpfully, Weber did not stop there. Using the example of Duverger’s laws, he suggested ways to close the “argumentative gap.” In this article, I aim to do just that.
... Is the EU responsive under politicized circumstances, and if so, what does responsive behaviour look like? One way research tackles this question is through the so-called 'thermostate' model (Wlezien, 1995): when the policy 'temperature' diverges from what the public prefers, public demands to adjust policy will increase. Once the policy is adjusted in the direction of the preferred 'temperature' , public demands decline again. ...
... In der Responsivitätsforschung meint gaps mögliche Kongruenzen und Inkongruenzen zwischen den (dominanten) Präferenzen in der Bevölkerung und den formulierten Policies durch die politischen Eliten aufzudecken (u. a. Wlezien 1995). In (europäischen) Regierungen sei darüber hinaus ein weiterer gap zwischen migrationsskeptischen Äußerungen und einer auf Basis ökonomischer Motive eher liberalen Einwanderungspolitik zu beobachten (Hollifield 1992: 581). ...
Wie werden Erkenntnisse im von Norm- und Wertekonflikten dominierten Feld der Migrations- und Integrationsforschung generiert und reflektiert? Die Beitragenden des Bandes gehen dieser Frage nach und diskutieren die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen im Rahmen ihres Vorgehens. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei die Verbindung zwischen der inhaltlichen Auseinandersetzung und dem methodisch-analytischen Vorgehen, denn die Transparenz der im Forschungsprozess getroffenen Entscheidungen ist für eine anwendungsorientierte Wissenschaft unabdingbar.
... However, if the government moves beyond the`comfort zone' of the general public, public opinion is likely to react and ask for more acceptable policies to be implemented (Stimson, 1991, p. 122-123). Wlezien (1995Wlezien ( , 1996, who analysed the evolution of defence expenditures over time, thus compared the responsiveness of public opinion to public spending with a thermostat: if the public considers defence expenditures to be too high (low), it will request lower (higher) spending levels in the future. Public opinion, hence, turned out to be a`permissive democratic constraint' (La Balme, 2000), able to shape international politics (Hill, 1998;Sobel, 2001). ...
The aim of this Ph.D. thesis is to examine the agenda-setting dynamics of defence. My key argument is that defence policy - which is often said to have an exceptional status on government agendas - has started to normalise. Defence, just like any other public policy, is increasingly constrained by structural biases and system-level dynamics, i.e. parts of the regal domain do not withdraw from the ‘traditional’ agenda-setting dynamics anymore. Three case studies constitute the core of my empirical analysis: the recruitment of service personnel, the acquisition of aircraft carriers and military operations. Based on an original data set that covers the period 1980-2018, I shed light on how these issues became and remained a government priority in France and the United Kingdom (UK), the two leading military powers in Europe. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, I reach two conclusions on agenda-building in defence. First, I demonstrate the importance of issue attributes at the subcategory level: the most concrete defence issues, such as military recruitment, follow dynamics that are very similar to those already identified for domestic issues; the most abstract defence issues, in turn, like procurement, will mobilise public opinion much less, but may nonetheless catch the attention of the media. Second, my results show that agenda-setting in defence coincides with the priorities of allied governments. More specifically, I highlight that the convergence of British and French defence programmes is inter alia due to mimicking behaviour. Consequently, I conclude that cross-national dynamics are key to understanding how government priorities in defence evolve over time.
... The process of policymaking in democratic societies is particularly complex, as it involves several actors, going from governments, lobbyists, technical experts and non-government organisations (NGOs) to the public opinion, consisting of voters who continuously shape politicians' views through their attitudes and preferences. At the collective level, public support for energy policy reforms may play a key role in democratic societies (Jagers et al., 2018;Wlezien, 1995), as citizens can guide policy change by electing an environmentally-aware political class (Panarello, 2021). Citizens can also "vote with wallet", rewarding green and sustainable companies which are attentive to environmental and resource concerns (Laureti and Benedetti, 2018). ...
The COVID-19 crisis has imposed a rediscussion of energy transition, offering the chance of promoting socioeconomic and ecological resilience to the energy sector, crucial for the post-pandemic recovery. Our societies are faced with a unique opportunity for changing people's behaviours and improving their lives. In the EU, the Green Deal is saluted as a new package of policy interventions aiming at achieving social goals such as job creation and reducing economic inequality – mostly by means of renewable energy and resource efficiency. However, the ongoing energy transition has been affected by COVID-19-related policy measures. This work proposes to give insights into the EU citizens' pre-pandemic perception of some key renewable energy transition, sustainability and resilience factors, which may be crucial with a view to finding prime energy policy indications useful for the post-pandemic recovery. Making use of 2019 EU Eurobarometer data, selected aspects of EU citizens' perceptions of energy policy are evaluated. Logit regressions are estimated to render energy perceptions modelling. Results suggest evidence of interrelated renewable energy transition issues for the EU, including resilience, vulnerability, cooperation, competition, sovereignty, security, safety and climate change. The findings indicate important social and environmental implications for energy policy modelling. The diversity of sorting results, regional-level differences and embodied domestic characteristics allow for macro-regional explorations.
Scholars studying the electoral breakthroughs of right-wing illiberalism have arrived at two general conclusions: while they largely rejected the hypothesis that this phenomenon is grounded in voters’ attitudinal shift, they have shown that those voting for the illiberal Right have distinguishing socio-economic and attitudinal characteristics. My analysis reconciles these two sets of findings by documenting the gradual emergence and transformation of the right-wing electorate in Poland in the period 1993–2018 and points to the consolidation of a right-wing partisanship as an organizing factor of the “illiberal moment.” Using the POLPAN panel dataset I find that populist and authoritarian attitudes indeed emerge in Poland in the twenty-first century to distinguish those supporting the Right more and more centered around the PiS party. These attitudes, however, have been incorporated in the context of partisan rivalry—right-wing voters, for example, are more supportive of limiting democratic procedures but only when the Right is in power. In the first decade of the twenty-first century PiS also politicized the lack of partisan consensus on the expansion of the welfare state. PiS incorporated this demand in its stance legitimizing the expansion of the welfare state through what was available in its ideological repertoire: national solidarity, national victimhood, and the idea of a sovereign nation-state joined under the umbrella of Catholic symbolism. This post-consensus polarization and asymmetrical political radicalization resembles the “illiberal moment” in Western Europe that followed the convergence between center-left and center-right parties but they lack a crystallized class-based political identity and social-democratic understanding of political economy to build on.
Dong-kyun Im examines Koreans’ attitudes about welfare expenditure, individuals’ ideas and beliefs about the role of the government, tax attitudes, and welfare schema. Despite the increased popular attention to economic inequality and insecurity in contemporary Korea, he found that both popular support for social welfare expenditure and emphasis on the responsibility of the government have generally weakened since the early 2000s. He suggests that the rapid development of the welfare state in Korea during the past few decades may have created different expectations and criteria in Koreans’ understanding of the role of the government and made Koreans more cautious of budget constraints. However, although the overall popular welfare attitudes have become relatively conservative than before, he also shows at the same time that Koreans still demand further expansion of the welfare state and more progressive tax schemes. Based on these findings, he concludes that the Korean welfare state will continue to grow to satisfy the public’s needs, although the rate of growth will be slower than before.
Background
Public opinion has a dynamic relationship with policy and real‐world outcomes in liberal settings where reliable information is abundant. In these settings, the public continuously updates its opinions with reliable policy‐relevant information, and the changes in public opinion go on to affect policy and outcomes. It is unknown whether this dynamic exists in illiberal settings where the public's access to reliable information is heavily restricted.
Objectives
This article advances a theory of public opinion's dynamic relationship with policy and outcomes that applies to illiberal settings.
Methods
Our study examines a vital public good in one of the world's most restrictive information environments and estimates a dynamic model of relationships among three variables—public opinion, policy, and outcomes—with a focus on public opinion and outcomes as the key dependent variables. The analysis looks at air pollution remediation in 274 Chinese localities.
Results
We find that public opinion reacts to objective air pollution outcomes and not to misleading information that downplays air pollution severity, which suggests the public can accurately evaluate the reliability of available information. We also find that local public opinion's impact on local air pollution is substantively meaningful on timescales as short as 1 to 2 years, indicating that the additional policy effort prompted by public opinion change is sufficient to yield tangible real‐world outcomes even in the short term.
Conclusion
Public opinion has a dynamic relationship with policy and real‐world outcomes even in highly illiberal settings. We argue that these findings are likely to generalize across issue domains with outcomes that can be directly observed by the public.
Prior to the Nixon administration, environmental policy in the United States was rudimentary at best. Since then, it has evolved into one of the primary concerns of governmental policy from the federal to the local level. As scientific expertise on the environment rapidly developed, Americans became more aware of the growing environmental crisis that surrounded them. Practical solutions for mitigating various aspects of the crisis—air pollution, water pollution, chemical waste dumping, strip mining, and later global warming—became politically popular, and the government responded by gradually erecting a vast regulatory apparatus to address the issue. Today, politicians regard environmental policy as one of the most pressing issues they face. The Obama administration has identified the renewable energy sector as a key driver of economic growth, and Congress is in the process of passing a bill to reduce global warming that will be one of the most important environmental policy acts in decades. The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy is a work that covers all aspects of environmental policy in America. Over the past half century, America has been the world's leading emitter of global warming gases. However, environmental policy is not simply a national issue. It is a global issue, and the explosive growth of Asian countries like China and India mean that policy will have to be coordinated at the international level. The book therefore focuses not only on the U.S., but on the increasing importance of global policies and issues on American regulatory efforts. This is a topic that only grows in importance in the coming years.
This paper seeks to connect the literature on preferences for redistribution to the literature on (unequal) policy responsiveness to public opinions. Based on an original survey conducted in 2019 that repeated policy-specific questions asked in the European Social Survey of 2008, we contest the conventional view that support for redistribution has been basically stable over time. Across the twelve West European countries encompassed by our data, support for progressive taxation and support for egalitarian unemployment benefits increased sharply from 2008 to 2019. While support for "taxing the rich" increased among all income groups, support for more egalitarian unemployment benefits increased among low-and middle-income citizens, but not among affluent citizens. In a second step, we explore the extent to which government policies have changed in response to shifts in public opinion. Very tentatively, this analysis suggest that government policy has been more responsive in the domain of income taxation than in the domain of unemployment compensation.
American public opinion on abortion has been investigated a multitude of times since the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade. In this trends article, we review public attitudes in five areas: (1) support or opposition to Roe v. Wade, (2) basic attitudes toward abortion, (3) attitudes toward abortion under different conditions, (4) attachments to the pro-choice versus pro-life labels, and (5) abortion attitudes in the 50 states. Initial public reaction to the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning Roe is also covered.
Wealth is often more unequally distributed than income, and there are considerable differences across countries. In this paper, we argue that wealth inequality helps explain cross-national variation in support for (and the size of) the welfare state because assets serve as private insurance. When wealth, particularly liquid assets, is unequally distributed across the income spectrum and high-income groups hold most assets, strong reinforcing preferences in favor of or against social policies result in antagonistic welfare politics and less government spending. When assets are more equitably distributed across the income spectrum, cross-cutting preferences emerge as more people support either insurance or redistribution. Welfare politics is consensual and facilitates a broader welfare coalition and more government spending. We analyze original cross-national survey data from nine OECD countries and provide evidence in support of our argument. Our findings suggest that wealth inequality reshapes the role of income in structuring welfare politics.
Several recent studies have found unequal policy responsiveness, meaning that the policy preferences of high-income citizens are better reflected in implemented policies than the policy preferences of low-income citizens. This has been found mainly in a few studies from the US and a small number of single-country studies from Western Europe. However, there is a lack of comparative studies that stake out the terrain across a broader group of countries. We analyze survey data on the policy preferences of about 3,000 policy proposals from thirty European countries over nearly forty years, combined with information on whether each policy proposal was implemented or not. The results from the cross-country data confirm the general pattern from previous studies that policies supported by the rich are more likely to be implemented than those supported by the poor. We also test four explanations commonly found in the literature: whether unequal responsiveness is exacerbated by (a) high economic inequality, (b) the absence of campaign finance regulations, (c) low union density, and (d) low voter turnout.
Previous research has shown that elected officials are more responsive to the opinions of high-income citizens than to those of middle and working-class citizens in the United States. This is often explained by the fact that economic elites make campaign contributions to political elites, leading to decision-making that aligns with the preferences of the affluent. This paper examines the opinion-policy link in Swedish politics, where campaign contributions are relatively low. Despite this, the study finds that high-income citizens still receive the most policy responsiveness. Three alternative possible explanations are discussed. Do high-income citizens receive more responsiveness because (a) they are better able to put issues on the political agenda, (b) because they are easier to satisfy and prefer ‘cheaper’ symbolic policy reforms, while low-income citizens prefer more costly policies or (c) because the status quo bias works to the advantage of high-income citizens?
The identification of problem information is an important driver of political attention in parliament. This is widely acknowledged in the literature on party competition but there has been surprisingly little empirical research on the extent and when it matters. By relying on an extensive cross-country data set matching data on the policy content of parliamentary oral questions from ten European parliamentary democracies with well-established problem indicators (economy, immigration, and terrorism), this study sets out to answer these important questions. Our time series analysis reveals that not all problem indicators drive political attention in parliament to the same extent and that responsiveness varies based on differences in how government and opposition parties strategically take up problems as well as a partisan logic between left and right parties. While real world problem indicators can be a strong driver of parliamentary attention, that drive is still filtered through political and institutional processes.
Public opinion reflects and shapes societal behavior, but the traditional survey-based tools to measure it are limited. We introduce a novel approach to probe media diet models -- language models adapted to online news, TV broadcast, or radio show content -- that can emulate the opinions of subpopulations that have consumed a set of media. To validate this method, we use as ground truth the opinions expressed in U.S. nationally representative surveys on COVID-19 and consumer confidence. Our studies indicate that this approach is (1) predictive of human judgements found in survey response distributions and robust to phrasing and channels of media exposure, (2) more accurate at modeling people who follow media more closely, and (3) aligned with literature on which types of opinions are affected by media consumption. Probing language models provides a powerful new method for investigating media effects, has practical applications in supplementing polls and forecasting public opinion, and suggests a need for further study of the surprising fidelity with which neural language models can predict human responses.
While governments prefer to alter budgets to fit their ideological stances, the domestic and international contexts can facilitate or constrain behavior. The Politics of Budgets demonstrates when governments do and do not make preferred budgetary changes. It argues for an interconnected view of budgets and explores both the reallocation of expenditures across policy areas and the interplay among budgetary components. While previous scholars have investigated how politics and economics shape a single budgetary category, or collective categories, this methodologically rich study analyzes data for thirty-three countries across thirty-five years to provide a more comprehensive theoretical approach: a 'holistic' framework about the competition and contexts around the budgetary process and an of examination of how and when these factors affect the budgetary decision-making processes.
A rise in anti-immigrant pressure can reduce asylum recognition rates, irrespective of individuals’ protection needs. Independent courts, which often act as a safeguard of migrant rights vis-à-vis such pressures, have been subject to increasing political interference. Yet, we know very little about how variation in the level of judicial independence – especially among lower courts – affects policy outcomes. In this paper, we assess the impact of anti-immigrant pressure and judicial independence on first and final instance refugee status determination decisions across 28 European Union member states over a ten-year period (2008–2018). We find that the relative independence of courts makes the biggest difference in asylum recognition rates at first and final instance when levels of anti-immigrant pressure are particularly high. This effect can be demonstrated not just regarding asylum appeals, but also for first instance decisions, suggesting that independent courts can have a liberal ‘foreshadowing effect’ on national asylum agencies.
Much of the political rhetoric that facilitated mass incarceration was predicated on the promise of reducing fear among the public. Yet, it remains unclear whether the large increases in imprisonment experienced in many areas made residents feel less afraid. We examine this issue by integrating geographic data on imprisonment with individual-level data on fear from the General Social Survey (GSS). We find that people from states and counties with greater “cumulative imprisonment” rates were no less afraid than their counterparts from areas that imprisoned many fewer people. These findings hold for the public overall and for non-Latino whites and members of the working and middle classes, who frequently were target audiences for political rhetoric linking mass incarceration era policies to fear reduction. Our study supports growing calls to decouple crime and criminal justice policy from politics and electoral cycles, and to develop evidence-based punishment approaches organized around transparent normative principles.
Around the world, there are increasing concerns about the accuracy of media coverage. It is vital in representative democracies that citizens have access to reliable information about what is happening in government policy, so that they can form meaningful preferences and hold politicians accountable. Yet much research and conventional wisdom questions whether the necessary information is available, consumed, and understood. This study is the first large-scale empirical investigation into the frequency and reliability of media coverage in five policy domains, and it provides tools that can be exported to other areas, in the US and elsewhere. Examining decades of government spending, media coverage, and public opinion in the US, this book assesses the accuracy of media coverage, and measures its direct impact on citizens' preferences for policy. This innovative study has far-reaching implications for those studying and teaching politics as well as for reporters and citizens.
Despite increasing their consumption footprints, high-income countries have improved domestic environmental and labour conditions. This incongruity is enabled by international trade, dissociating consumption benefits from adverse production impacts. However, political debates on new regulation to make environmental and labour practices more sustainable throughout companies’ global supply chains have emerged in the Global North. While shifting public sentiment towards regulating global business practices could place sustainability on the policy agenda forefront, citizen support for such policies remains under-identified. Here we explore dimensions of citizen support for global supply chain regulations via survey-embedded experiments. We find that citizens prefer strong reporting requirements and enforcement capabilities across the 12 largest OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) importing countries (N = 24,003). Further, such policy preferences are driven by environmental attitudes and political ideology, and are robust against pro-/anti-market informational manipulation. These results suggest substantial, cross-national public opinion mandates for policy interventions to make global supply chains more transparent. From a sustainability perspective, this is an a priori encouraging finding as it implies that over the last decade, public opinion on this emerging policy topic has matured. Consequently, political actors have an incentive to situate the subject prominently on their policy programmes.
What preferences do people have for cross‐country cooperation on irregular migration and refugee protection? While existing research improves our understanding of how voters react to large‐scale inflows of asylum seekers, like those experienced by European countries in 2015–2016, and the type of asylum seekers and policies preferred by European citizens, we know less about people's views concerning a particular EU response to the so‐called ‘refugee crisis’, namely the cooperation it agreed with Turkey in March 2016 to stem inflows of asylum seekers and other migrants. To study such views, we build on several strands of the international relations literature exploring key determinants of public preferences for international cooperation on cross‐national issues, namely (a) sociotropic concerns, (b) humanitarian considerations, and (c) perceptions of fairness and reciprocity. Our research design leverages conjoint experiments conducted simultaneously in Germany, Greece, and Turkey. We find that the three factors play indeed a role in explaining preferences in the three countries. Moreover, while respondents are favorable to several core features of the current EU‐Turkey migration deal (regarding the return of irregular migrants, financial aid to refugees, and border controls), we also find evidence of public support for increased cooperation on resettlement and EU support to Greece to deal with migration, which goes beyond the status quo. In certain aspects of cooperation, public preferences seem to respond to interactions between policy dimensions that capture reciprocity. These findings have important implications for research on public preferences for asylum and migration policies and public support for international cooperation more generally. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
How do issues end up on the agenda? Why do lawmakers routinely invest in program oversight and broad policy development? What considerations drive legislative policy change? For many, Congress is an institution consumed by partisan bickering and gridlock. Yet the institution's long history of addressing significant societal problems - even in recent years - seems to contradict this view. Congress and the Politics of Problem Solving argues that the willingness of many voters to hold elected officials accountable for societal conditions is central to appreciating why Congress responds to problems despite the many reasons mustered for why it cannot. The authors show that, across decades of policy making, problem-solving motivations explain why bipartisanship is a common pattern of congressional behavior and offer the best explanation for legislative issue attention and policy change.
How do issues end up on the agenda? Why do lawmakers routinely invest in program oversight and broad policy development? What considerations drive legislative policy change? For many, Congress is an institution consumed by partisan bickering and gridlock. Yet the institution's long history of addressing significant societal problems - even in recent years - seems to contradict this view. Congress and the Politics of Problem Solving argues that the willingness of many voters to hold elected officials accountable for societal conditions is central to appreciating why Congress responds to problems despite the many reasons mustered for why it cannot. The authors show that, across decades of policy making, problem-solving motivations explain why bipartisanship is a common pattern of congressional behavior and offer the best explanation for legislative issue attention and policy change.
A common thread unites the research on the politics of macroeconomic policy, namely, that specific policy instruments are targeted at specific policy goals. Policy Substitutability, the use of different policy instruments to affect the same goal, is implicitly denied. Yet, economic theory indicates that policymakers have multiple policy instruments at their disposal that can be used alternately or in some combination to manipulate their economies. This paper explicitly addresses macroeconomic policy Substitutability among a set of advanced industrial nations, and focuses on whether certain policies are being used together by governments for political purposes.
The representation of public preferences in public policy is fundamental to most conceptions of democracy. If representation is effectively undertaken, we would expect to find a correspondence between public preferences for policy and policy itself. If representation is dynamic, policy makers should respond to changes in preferences over time. The integrity of the representational connection, however, rests fundamentally on the expectation that the public actually notices and responds to policy decisions. Such a public would adjust its preferences for 'more' or 'less' policy in response to what policy makers actually do, much like a thermostat. Despite its apparent importance, there is little research that systematically addresses this feedback of policy on preferences over time. Quite simply, we do not know whether the public adjusts its preferences for policy in response to what policy makers do. By implication, we do not fully understand the dynamics of representation. This research begins to address these issues and focuses on the relationships between public preferences and policy in a single, salient domain.
Public preferences about the availability of abortion under various circumstances have remained fairly stable over time. Yet a standard CBS/New York Times abortion question indicates that a significant shift in opinion occurred during the 1980s, whereby the public became increasingly supportive of legalized abortion as it is now. These very different patterns of public opinion about abortion suggest that the public perceived a shift in the abortion status quo, toward more restricted access, over time, and became more supportive of current abortion policy.A model of support for legalized abortion as it is now is developed that incorporates the influences of court activities and interest-group behavior. The analysis indicates that the public reacted directly to the activities of the courts, becoming more supportive of current abortion policy in response to media coverage of court cases that challenged the abortion status quo and Supreme Court nominations and confirmations. Although absolute preferences remained largely unchanged, it appears the public perceived an increasing threat to the status quo and became correspondingly less enamored with further restrictions on the availability of abortion.
We measure the extent to which military spending policy reflects public opinion, while controlling for other reasonable influences on policy. We use survey data as an indicator of aggregate public opinion on military spending and find evidence that changes in public opinion consistently exert an effect on changes in military spending. The influence of public opinion is less important than either Soviet military spending or the gap between U.S. and Soviet military spending and more important than the deficit and the balance of Soviet conflict/cooperation with the United States. We also examine the hypothesis that public opinion does not influence the government but that the government systematically manipulates public opinion. We find no evidence to support this hypothesis.
Voters in mass elections are notorious for their apparent lack of information about relevant political matters. While some scholars argue that an electorate of well-informed voters is necessary for the production of responsive electoral outcomes, others argue that apparently ignorant voters will suffice because they can adapt their behavior to the complexity of electoral choice. To evaluate the validity of these arguments, I develop and analyze a survey of California voters who faced five complicated insurance reform ballot initiatives. I find that access to a particular class of widely available information shortcuts allowed badly informed voters to emulate the behavior of relatively well informed voters. This finding is suggestive of the conditions under which voters who lack encyclopedic information about the content of electoral debates can nevertheless use information shortcuts to vote as though they were well informed.
In spite of the fact that political eras in the United States are widely (and often ambiguously) defined in terms of a general policy sentiment or mood, political scientists have done little in the way of rigorous analysis regarding this subject. I argue that shifts in domestic policy sentiment along a liberal–conservative continuum may be understood in part as responses to changing economic expectations. Specifically, expectations of a strong economy result in greater support for liberal domestic policies, whereas anticipation of declining economic conditions pushes the national policy mood to the right. Using quarterly data for the period 1968–88, I present a multiple-time-series error correction model that lends considerable support to the hypothesis.
This study examines the nature, sources, and consequences of citizens' attitudes toward government spending. Data from the 1984 CPS National Election Study are used to perform a scaling analysis of mass spending preferences across a set of 10 public policies. The empirical results indicate that there is a coherent structure underlying citizens' attitudes toward social welfare spending. In contrast, spending preferences for nonwelfare programs are separate and largely unrelated concerns. I argue that this distinction is essential for understanding public opinion on government spending. And further analyses incorporating the difference between welfare and nonwelfare spending preferences provide important, theoretically relevant insights about the relationship between citizens in the mass public and stimuli in the political world.
We examine the roles of democratic politics and political institutions in shaping social welfare spending in 18 contemporary capitalist democracies. We explore the social spending consequences of government partisanship, electoral competition and turnout, and the self-interested behaviors of politicians and bureaucrats, as well as such relatively durable facets of political institutions as neocorporatism, state centralization, and traditionalist policy legacies. Pooled time series analyses of welfare effort in 18 nations during the 1960–82 period show that electoral turnout, as well as left and center governments increase welfare effort; that the welfare efforts of governments led by particular types of parties show significant differences and vary notably with the strength of oppositional (and junior coalitional) parties; and that relatively neocorporatist, centralized, and traditionalistic polities are high on welfare effort. Overall, our findings suggest that contrary to many claims, both partisan and nonpartisan facets of democratic politics and political institutions shape contemporary social welfare effort.
Representatives' votes on a series of defense budget roll calls in the first year of the Reagan administration's Pentagon buildup are related to constituency opinions on defense spending during the 1980 election campaign. The strong aggregate constituency demand for increased defense spending in 1980 is estimated to have added almost 17 billion (about 10%) to the total fiscal year 1982 Pentagon appropriation. The impact of constituency opinion was largely independent of specific political circumstances: differential responsiveness in districts with partisan turnover, intense district level competition, and strong presidential coattails together accounted for less than 1 billion in additional appropriations, with the remaining $16 billion attributable to across-the-board responsiveness by even the most safely incumbent representatives.
For political scientists who engage in longitudinal analyses, the question of how best to deal with nonstationary time-series is anything but settled. While many believe that little is lost when the focus of empirical models shifts from the nonstationary levels to the stationary changes of a series, others argue that such an approach erases any evidence of a long-term relationship among the variables of interest. But the pitfalls of working directly with integrated series are well known, and post-hoc corrections for serially correlated errors often seem inadequate. Compounding (or perhaps alleviating, if one believes in the power of selective perception) the difficult question of whether to difference a time-series is the fact that analysts have been forced to rely on subjective diagnoses of the stationarity of their data. Thus, even if one felt strongly about the superiority of one modeling approach over another, the procedure for determining whether that approach is even applicable can be frustrating.
The usual model of electoral reaction to economic conditions assumes the “retrospective” economic voter who bases expectations solely on recent economic performance or personal economic experience (voter as “peasant”). A second model assumes a “sophisticated” economic voter who incorporates new information about the future into personal economic expectations (voter as “banker”). Using the components, both retrospective and prospective, of the Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) as intervening variables between economic conditions and approval, we find that the prospective component fully accounts for the presidential approval time series. With aggregate consumer expectations about long-term business conditions in the approval equation, neither the usual economic indicators not the other ICS components matter. Moreover, short-term changes in consumer expectations respond more to current forecasts than to the current economy. The qualitative result is a rational expectations outcome: the electorate anticipates the economic future and rewards or punishes the president for economic events before they happen.
Carmines and Stimson's theory of racial issue evolution has strongly influenced scholarly and popular interpretations of U.S. party politics. The central proposition of this theory is that racial attitudes have shaped \ the party loyalties of voters who have entered the electorate since 1964. Using data from the 1980 and 1988 American National Election Studies, this paper undertakes a test of the theory of racial issue evolution by examining the relationships between racial attitudes and party identification among white U.S. citizens. The evidence presented in this paper shows that racial attitudes had very little influence on party identification among either younger or older whites. Other issues, especially those involving the scope of the welfare state and national security, played a much larger role in driving many whites away from the Democratic party during the 1980s. Furthermore, racial attitudes had a negligible impact on whites' candidate preference in the 1988 presidential election.
Diversity and Complexity in American Public Opinion In Politi-cal Science: The State of the Discipline
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Public Opinion and Popular Government
- Robert Weissberg
Weissberg, Robert. 1976. Public Opinion and Popular Government. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
The Paradox of Ignorant Voters, But Competent Electorate
- James Stimson
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Stimson, James. 1989. "The Paradox of Ignorant Voters, But Competent Electorate." In Perspectives on American and Texas Politics, ed. Donald S. Lutz and Kent L. Tedin. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt.
U.S. National Security Policy and the Soviet Union
- Richard Stoll
Stoll, Richard. 1990. U.S. National Security Policy and the Soviet Union. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press.
Budget Authority vs. Outlays as Measures of Budget Policy
- John W Ellwood
Ellwood, John W. 1986. "Budget Authority vs. Outlays as Measures of Budget Policy." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C.
The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presiden-tial CampaignsThe Electoral Impact of Press Cover-age of the British Economy
- Popkin
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