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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.
... Desde hace décadas se ha ido consolidando una prolífica línea de investigación sobre la capacidad de respuesta de los sistemas políticos a las preferencias sociales y el efecto de las acciones políticas sobre las actitudes ciudadanas (por ejemplo, Page y Shapiro, 1983;Wlezien, 1995Wlezien, y 2004Erikson …[et al], 2002). Se trata de una cuestión relevante para las ciencias sociales, aunque controvertida, pues mientras que algunos estudios han aportado evidencias de que la opinión pública ejerce un fuerte efecto sobre la política, otros trabajos ponen en cuestión que tal efecto sea significativo, o no han considerado cómo y cuánto influye la política sobre las preferencias colectivas (Manza ...[et al], 2002: 17). ...
... 1999; Soroka y Lim, 2003;Wlezien, 1995Wlezien, , 1996Wlezien, y 2010Manza y Cook, 2002;Burstein, 2003;Binzer y Klemmensen, 2005y 2008Brooks y Manza, 2006;Soroka y Wlezien, 2005y 2010. Estas investigaciones evidenciaron que resulta extremadamente complejo evaluar el grado de receptividad de ciudadanos y gobiernos, así como establecer conclusiones definitivas acerca de la capacidad de respuesta del sistema político, o del efecto que ejerce la sociedad en la política (Monroe, 1998: 7). ...
... Entre las investigaciones que han estudiado la relación entre las preferencias sociales y las decisiones gubernamentales en materia de gasto público destacan las realizadas por Wlezien (1995Wlezien ( , 1996Wlezien ( , 2004Wlezien ( y 2011, y Soroka y Wlezien (2005 y 2010). En estos estudios, las preferencias de los ciudadanos se miden a través de la demanda de recursos, y las políticas públicas -sus outputs-se miden a partir de la distribución real del gasto público. ...
The congruence between social preferences and government policies has become an essential aspect of the representative democracies and the State-society relations. Based on this premise, this article explores the interaction between public opinion and public policy in Spain during the last two decades, through the empirical analysis of the relationship between citizens’ preferences public spending and spending policies. Specifically, it is studied the effect of public opinion on government decisions about the allocation of public spending in eight key policies, as well as the influence of these decisions on social demands. The article aims to answer two questions: 1) Are governments responsive to society’s preferences and are citizens sensitive to government decisions? 2) Is the level of responsiveness different depending on the public policy? The results indicate that the political decisions on spending are moderately affected by social preferences, while government actions have a limited influence on citizen demands. Moreover, the analysis shows that prior to the Great Recession of 2008, a significant level of consistency between public opinion and policy had been achieved, which was considerably reduced during the crisis. Finally, it was found that the degree of responsiveness varies significantly from one policy to another and that it is higher in welfare policies, except for the unemployment protection program.
... Below, we apply hierarchical dictionary counts and supervised learning to media coverage of change in US defense spending, a publicly salient domain in which there is strong evidence of thermostatic public responsiveness (Wlezien, 1995(Wlezien, , 1996Soroka & Wlezien, 2010). We rely on a corpus of roughly 2 million articles from 17 newspapers over the period between 1980 and 2018, applying a combination of hierarchical dictionary searches as well as a random forest machine learning algorithm trained on sentences extracted using dictionaries and coded by humansan approach which we label the dictionary-plus-supervised-learning approach. ...
... The initial motivation for our research is to better understand the role of mass media as a mechanism(s) of policy feedback. Some research demonstrates negative feedback, where the public adjusts its public preference "inputs" thermostatically in response to policy "outputs" (Wlezien, 1995;Erikson et al., 2002;Eichenberg & Stoll, 2003;Jennings, 2009;Soroka & Wlezien, 2010;Ellis & Faricy, 2011;Ura & Ellis, 2012;Wlezien & Soroka, 2012;Pacheco, 2013). Other research finds positive feedback, where an increase in policy leads people to want more spending in that domain (see the excellent review of the large and diverse literature in Beland & Schlager, 2019). ...
... Legitimacy is not about affect-based personal preference, but about a broader societal judgment. In existing literature, Wlezien (1995) conceptualizes public sentiment as a "public thermostat," implying that deviations from preferred policy positions trigger a corrective response from policymakers. This analogy highlights public sentiment as a legitimate constraint on advocacy efforts. ...
... Public sentiment is a key indicator of these dynamics. In accordance with the "public thermostat" analogy (Wlezien, 1995), positive public sentiment signifies acceptance of a corporation's stance. Hence, legitimacy is granted, allowing the company to represent the public's interests. ...
For corporations engaged in corporate social advocacy (CSA), establishing legitimacy among publics is challenging when they take stands along clear ideological lines on controversial issues. This study examined two questions: (1) how would the congruence between individuals' political ideologies and corporations' CSA stances influence perceived CSA legitimacy; and (2) how would individuals' political ideology strength moderate this relationship? A computational analysis was conducted to examine individual-level ideological congruence and perceived CSA legitimacy in six real-world CSA events. Pairing sentiment analysis with a self-trained model for individual ideology detection, this study cross-analyzed naturalistic data generated by 5181 ordinary users involved in the CSA events on Twitter. It was found that individuals' perceptions of corporations involved in CSA were highly dependent on the extent to which their own political ideologies were congruent with the corpora-tions' CSA stances. Also, the influence of ideological congruence was amplified among individuals with stronger political ideologies. However, CSA legitimacy perceptions can be highly situational, with individual events potentially yielding varied results depending on factors such as the issue's socio-historical context. This study overall demonstrates the important role that individual-level political factors can play in influencing publics' CSA legitimacy perceptions. This study also highlights the feasibility of using cutting-edge computational methods in assessing publics' voices on social media as a source of CSA legitimacy.
... The public's assessment of military engagements and war is sensitive to casualties (Eichenberg 2003;Gelpi et al., 2009;Mueller, 1973), their implications on trade ties or military expenditures (Gleditsch et al., 2019), and whether they are financed through taxes or debt (Flores-Macías and Kreps, 2017). When it comes to arms spending, citizens may make trade-offs between 'guns and butter' (Carrubba and Singh, 2004;Wlezien, 1995) and procurement questions often revolve around the cost-effectiveness as well as the implications for national defence industries and jobs (Hoeffler and Mérand, 2016;Ringsmose, 2013;Uttley and Wilkinson, 2016). ...
... 2. Nor do we claim that the public does not recognise general trade-offs or that there are no interdependencies between preferences (e.g. Hansen, 1998;Wlezien, 1995). 3. The military intervention scenario did not specifically mention the EU as the organisational framework in which the intervention takes place. ...
In surveys, Europeans routinely express high levels of support for a common security and defence policy of the European Union. Do these responses reflect real demands or superficial support that would crumble if the issue was politicised? This article provides new answers to this question. We conducted pre-registered survey experiments with more than 40,000 respondents from 25 European countries in which we randomly varied whether respondents received information about potential costs of two hypothetical cooperative activities: military operations and defence procurement. Support for these activities was systematically lower when costs were mentioned. We conclude that, in the event of politicisation, there is considerable potential for shifts in opinion and that caution is required in deriving a mandate for specific activities from high approval rates for cooperation in general.
... When people take a more left-leaning stance, parties in general-or at least the particular parties these individuals vote for-also endorse more left-leaning policies. Further research also confirms a relationship between public policy preferences and the policies governments implement (e.g., Carrubba 2001;Hakhverdian 2012;Stimson et al. 1995;Page and Shapiro 1983; see the reviews by Burstein 2003 andWlezien andSoroka 2007). The thermostatic model garnered considerable empirical support, which suggests that policymakers adapt policies in reaction to changes in public opinion over time (Wlezien 1995;Wlezien and Soroka 2007). ...
... Further research also confirms a relationship between public policy preferences and the policies governments implement (e.g., Carrubba 2001;Hakhverdian 2012;Stimson et al. 1995;Page and Shapiro 1983; see the reviews by Burstein 2003 andWlezien andSoroka 2007). The thermostatic model garnered considerable empirical support, which suggests that policymakers adapt policies in reaction to changes in public opinion over time (Wlezien 1995;Wlezien and Soroka 2007). ...
This literature review investigates the effects of public opinion on political outcomes in democracies, focusing on Comparative Political Economy (CPE) research. Many CPE researchers expect that parties and governments respond to public policy preferences that are exogenous to the political process. This review first formalizes the common CPE argument and then derives an alternative theoretical perspective from political psychology and political communication research. The contrasting theory highlights the impreciseness and endogeneity of public opinion, wherein political elites actively shape public sentiment. Through a comparative analysis of these contrasting theoretical approaches, the review extracts insights that promise to enrich future CPE research. It also develops the fundamentals of a theory on the impact of public opinion on political outcomes, which suggests that public opinion can be seen as an “elastic corridor” that constrains the opportunity space of parties.
... This approach improves 6 Beiser-McGrath and Bernauer (2022) reveal that domestic public support for environmentally friendly policies is positively linked to the implementation of emission-reducing policies in other countries due to the central role of reciprocity in forming individual support for climate change mitigation. Given that policy adoption critically depends on public opinion (Aklin and Mildenberger 2020;Wlezien 1995), the crossborder spillovers of pro-climate attitudes further help explain why climate change policies inevitably transcend national borders. Several studies document evidence suggesting the importance of international policy diffusion in driving unilateral climate change policy adoption (see, e.g., Fankhauser et al. 2016;Sauquet 2014;Linsenmeier et al. 2022;Thisted and Thisted 2020). ...
This paper establishes a statistically and economically significant relationship between national responses to climate change and genetic distance, which is a proxy for countries' dissimilarities in cultures, ancestry, and historical legacies associated with long‐term exposure to divergent historical trajectories. It finds that countries that are genetically distant to the world‐leading nation‐state of climate change mitigation tend to experience barriers to the cross‐border diffusion of climate change policies and hence exhibit worse responses to climate change. A potential explanation is that climate change polices are more likely to spread between closely related countries with more similar preferences for the provision of the public goods of environmental and climate protection. The findings imply that strengthening climate change mitigation requires overcoming obstacles to international policy diffusion.
... The typical voter wants the state to provide public services like healthcare, education, and welfare and to reduce unemployment and inequality, but they also want lower taxes, less bureaucracy, lower inflation, and worry about the disincentive effects of welfare. The electorate's current preferences depend on the balance of current policy (Wlezien, 1995). As governments provide 'more' spending, the public increasingly prefer progressively 'less.' ...
Postwar electoral dynamics were framed by a two-party system that usually provided single-party governments with a legislative majority. These conditions promoted a pendulum-like swing of votes between two parties who alternated in office. The electorate responded 'thermostatically' to policy and imposed the 'costs of ruling' on government. The major parties competed by moderating their positions and building their reputations for competence. The parties vacated the centre in the 1970s and lost their reputations, leading to an increase in the centre-party vote. Although the Liberal Democrat vote collapsed after 2010, niche parties, such as, Reform UK, the Greens, and the Scottish National Party, have expanded their support. These developments have produced increasingly complicated dynamics. The major parties now risk losing votes to parties on their flanks. This reduces the appeal of moderation and causes uncertainty about strategy. Governments still experience thermostatic effects and the costs of ruling, creating opportunities for a range of opposition parties. These dynamics will produce volatility that the plurality electoral system will amplify to produce more astonishing electoral turnarounds, and complicate strategic decision-making for parties. 3
... Nevertheless, considering the ample literature suggesting that politicians often align with public positions (e.g., Beyer and Hänni, 2018), we have reasonable confidence that our findings would likely remain consistent. For instance, if citizens engage significantly with a post advocating reduced government spending, we could anticipate politicians pushing for decreased government spending in their legislative actions (Wlezien, 1995). ...
Studies have shown that citizens’ engagement on social media drives politicians to adapt the issues they discuss online. However, for representative democracy to function effectively, politicians must not only discuss these issues but also act on them. This paper explores whether higher citizens’ engagement on social media shapes the issues politicians address online and leads to substantive agenda responsiveness, such as proposing legislation or raising issues in parliament. To do this, we examined over 370,000 Facebook posts by more than 350 politicians in Australia, Belgium, and the United States. Our results indicate that higher citizens’ engagement on politicians’ own social media regarding an issue increases the likelihood of politicians promoting concrete legislative or parliamentary actions related to that issue, regardless of the issue’s salience. These findings highlight social media’s role in informing and motivating politicians’ agenda responsiveness, with important implications for the current state of representative democracy.
... There is a difference between 'congruence' and 'responsiveness'. The first refers to a static concept, while responsiveness is dynamic and more encompassing (see Powell, 2004;Wlezien, 1995). 10. ...
Government responsiveness is a key feature and justification for democracy. Yet, previous studies show that the ability of governments to deliver responsive policies critically depends on the availability of resources. This study suggests that the shadow economy hurts democratic responsiveness because it reduces government revenues and decreases the reliability of economic statistics. Governments facing lower resources then respond to wider economic constraints and not to their publics. Using Eurobarometer data to evaluate public opinion in 15 European democracies and data on welfare generosity to measure policy outputs, this study finds that larger submerged economies correspond to less responsive governments. Additionally, the empirical analysis highlights that the shadow economy makes welfare systems less generous and taxation rates more demanding. These novel results have important implications for our understanding of democracy and help us clarify the conditions under which governments are more or less likely to deliver responsive policies. Finally, these results demonstrate the importance of studying the political consequences of the shadow economy.
... Regarding the issue of defense spending, observational research reveals an association over time between defense spending and public opinion whereby support for additional spending increased during periods when the actual expenditure decreased and vice versa (Wlezien, 1995;Wlezien and Soroka, 2023). This relationship suggests that citizens' attitudes toward defense spending are responsive to factual information about the current expenditure, but experimental evidence on the effect of corrective information is currently lacking. ...
Democrats and Republicans have polarized in their attitudes (i.e., ideological
polarization) and their feelings toward each other (i.e., affective polarization). Simultaneously, both groups also seem to diverge in their factual beliefs about
reality. This preregistered survey experiment among 2,253 American citizens
examined how this factualbeliefpolarizationmay or may not fuel ideological and
affective polarization around four key issues: income differences, immigration,
climate change, and defense spending. On all issues except immigration,
Democrats and Republicans were equally or more divided in their factual beliefs
about the present than in their ideals for the future. Corrective information
decreased partisan polarization over some ideals, but not directional policy
attitudes. Priming respondents’ factual beliefs conversely increased polarization
around defense spending, but not other issues. Much remains unclear about the
complex relation between factual beliefs and polarization, but measuring ideals
and priming beliefs could be promising avenues for future research.
... However, this latter mechanism would struggle to explain why, after two terms, incumbent-parties no longer appear to wield any advantage. 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). Lawmakers' 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 presidential 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 unclear. This study proposes many citizens generally believe that, ceteris paribus, presidents should be afforded two terms. Crucially, such a norm implies that incumbency status possesses an inherent effect, operating independent of other mechanisms that may stem from incumbency. A large, pre-registered survey experiment was therefore employed to isolate the effect of incumbency status on presidential vote choice. The experiment finds strong evidence that one-term incumbent candidates have an inherent advantage against their non-incumbent opponents. The results also clarify that the two-term disadvantage present in observational data is not inherent, and is perhaps better understood simply as the absence of the one-term advantage. The study thus points toward 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 the incumbency status of presidential candidates.
... These examples, and also a wealth of theoretical and empirical literature on how mass public opinion influences policy-making (Culpepper 2011;Wlezien 1995;Soroka and Wlezien 2010;Schakel et al., 2020), strongly suggest that changes in the PT system are more likely to be successful if they are in line with prevailing preferences amongst the population, both in their role as citizens and PT users (consumers). This is particularly the case in direct democratic contexts, such as Switzerland, where citizens hold extensive rights to support or veto policy changes (Stadelmann-Steffen 2011;Tsebelis 2002), and where voters have in fact prevented changes in the PT system, at least in part due to concerns over an uneven distribution of benefits (Hürlimann 2007). ...
... Therefore, the representation gap is compared at the national level based on preference differences occurring at the same time point. In light of this, this volume differs from studies whose mass-elite preference comparisons are conducted in one (or several) regions within a country, for example, Kuklinski (1978), and from studies, often known as "responsiveness literature," whose key focus lies on investigating how elites shift their position over time and to what degree this matches shifts in the electorate, for example, Wlezien (1995). Furthermore, this volume approaches the mass-elite discrepancy theme from the perspective of representative democracy; therefore, the primary comparison is between voters and parliamentary representatives. ...
The chapter is dedicated to expanding our conceptual understanding of mass-elite policy preference discrepancy (MED). It utilizes comprehensive meta-analysis results, revealing an explosive growth in MED publications over the past decade, largely driven by research on Western Europe. This trend is closely related to the key policy domains or issue areas where MED has been identified, reflecting the trajectories of Western European party politics. The chapter then shows that adopting a global perspective significantly broadens the range of policy areas and issues where MED is observed, often reflecting the distinct domestic and international environments within which party competition occurs. Additionally, by extending our focus to various world regions, we can uncover previously overlooked variations in the structure and timing of MED. The global-level variations in specific MED content, structure, and timing revealed in this chapter become the central focus of the subsequent theoretical and empirical chapters.
... Our data clearly shows that the Left has become increasingly unable to reduce inequalities even in areas where there is still scope for improvement, as in the case of power equality by socioeconomic position. In this regard, it is also hard to imagine that left parties have interrupted their egalitarian efforts due to a shift in the preferences of a public that, according to the thermostatic model (e.g., Wlezien 1995), have readjusted their issue priorities following the achievement of high levels of equality. Indeed, not only are highly egalitarian outcomes still largely unaccomplished, but-as public opinion data shows-public preferences are still oriented toward the reduction of inequalities. ...
Despite considerable attention in the literature, existing studies analyzing the effect of left governmental power on inequalities suffer from three main limitations: a privileged focus on economic forms of inequality at the expense of political and social ones, inaccurate measurements of left governmental power, and a narrow timespan of the analyses. This article addresses such concerns through a comparative longitudinal analysis where the impact of left governmental power on different measures of political, social, and economic inequalities is investigated in 20 Western European countries across the last 150 years. Data show that, consistent with previous literature, the left in government has significantly reduced most forms of inequalities. However, the equalizing effect of the left in government has decreased over time and has become not significant since the 1980s. The left is today incapable of accomplishing its historical mission of reducing inequalities. The article discusses rationale and implications of these findings.
... La congruencia entre las preferencias y las políticas públicas es fundamental en las democracias representativas. De especial relevancia al respecto son las perspectivas de investigación sobre la correspondencia entre los insumos de las preferencias públicas y los resultados de las políticas públicas, particularmente cuando no pueden ser evaluadas directamente (Wlezien, 1995(Wlezien, , 2017. ...
Tradicionalmente la opinión pública internacional ha sido estudiada, desde la disciplina de las Relaciones Internacionales, en relación con los asuntos de seguridad y conflictos internacionales y la diplomacia pública, con una óptica basada fundamentalmente en el estudio de la política exterior de los estados. Conceptualmente se entendía como la suma de las opiniones públicas, desde el paradigma internacional estatocéntrico, y posteriormente desde la convergencia de las opiniones de los públicos internacionales con la influencia de los medios de comunicación tradicionales como agentes globalizadores y mediadores en la formación de los públicos internacionales. Con la llegada de la globalización digital, la opinión pública internacional se ha analizado desde teorías que se centran en la diplomacia pública, en la comunicación política y en teorías que enfatizan la dimensión social y colectiva del conocimiento para dar mayor amplitud al estudio de la integración y uso de las nuevas tecnologías. Sin embargo, hacen falta nuevos análisis en los que se tenga en cuenta el contexto de la geopolítica de la globalización desinformativa y su repercusión en la composición de los nuevos públicos digitales internacionales y que analicen cómo se articulan las opiniones públicas internacionales divergentes, como actor agregado que deriva en movimientos sociales. El estudio tiene como objetivo describir las características de la opinión pública internacional digital como nuevo actor en la esfera virtual, considerando las contradicciones que la geopolítica de la desinformación puede generar sobre los públicos internacionales. Para su reflexión se toma como punto de partida la teoría de la complejidad de Rosenau (1978) a partir del concepto de actor de naturaleza de agregación accidental no deliberada para la descripción de la opinión pública digital internacional, así como la teoría de la racionalidad de baja información para la comprensión de la composición actual de los públicos digitales internacionales con baja formación e información. Metodológicamente, se emplean los métodos descriptivo, analítico y comparativo. El primero y segundo, para describir la opinión pública internacional sustentada por los públicos internacionales, y para las analizar las teorías y su aplicación sobre estos. El tercero, para comparar datos cuantitativos de informes internacionales sobre el orden y el control de la información y la desinformación digital en el ciberespacio, a través de las redes sociales y el uso de la inteligencia artificial en una muestra que abarca ochenta y un países. La primera parte del trabajo aborda las perspectivas sobre las que se ha estudiado la opinión pública internacional desde el paradigma de las Relaciones Internacionales, teniendo en cuenta la dificultad de su medición y la dimensión digital como aspecto clave del desafío. En la segunda parte se estudia el contexto de la geopolítica de la globalización desinformativa, con las estrategias de manipulación de la opinión pública internacional. En la tercera parte se analiza la composición de los públicos internacionales. En cuarto lugar, se describe la opinión pública internacional como actor transcultural desde la teoría de la racionalidad de baja información. En último término se incluyen los resultados y conclusiones, subrayando la aportación teórica del estudio.
... According to Burstein (2010), the impact of citizens' preferences on public policy is amazingly robust. It is further argued that as the government complies with the public's demands to make changes, in return, in order to express satisfaction, the public adjusts its preferences accordingly and ceases to pressure change (Burstein 2010;Soroka and Lim 2003;Soroka and Wlezien 2005;Wlezien 1995Wlezien , 2004. Nonetheless, citizen's high democratic expectations lead to political disengagement and institutional distrust as they recognize the wide gap between politicians, government, and citizens (Dalton 2004;Norris 1999). ...
Under which circumstances local governments' responsiveness to its residents' preferences overtakes the central government's accountability for public preferences at the national level in democracies? This study hypothesizes that, (1) A lacuna in public services at the national level due to institutional constraints, leading to (2) societal dissatisfaction as expressed by public opinion, as well as (3) local politicians in search for re-election, will lead local governments to account for public preferences. We further argue that local governments' goal in accounting for public preferences is to follow the mayor's personal ideology as well as enhance democratic values, while predominantly improving their political gains. Using a mixed method design, this study paints on the mechanism behind local initiatives to overcome policy restrictions on three religion-based policies in Israel. It demonstrates that efforts made by local governments to supply the lacking public services are an act of local responsiveness conjoint with political aspirations.
... Inspired by the work of Easton (1965) and Wlezien (1995), the role of endogenous institutions can be depicted as a sophisticated controller mechanism from a system perspective. Macroscopically, the outline structure of the endogenous institutional model coupled with a land use model represented by the CRAFTY agent-based modelling framework is a closed-loop control system, where an institution is populated with a sequence of components forming a decision entity. ...
Policy interventions have substantial effects on land use change, providing key levers for multiple objectives, including mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss, and maintaining food security. Policy effects are often complicated, conflicting, and subject to regular change. Despite this, land system models typically treat policies as simple, exogenous modifications to models. To better represent the dynamic nature of policy-making, we develop an endogenous institutional model that can be embedded within land system models, here exemplified by an agent-based model. Numerical experiments are conducted to examine an institution with two policies targeting the production of ecosystem services. We find a clear scope for simulation-based exploration of policy-making, with emergent processes including the marginal diminishing effect of economic policy interventions, asymmetric spill-over effects for different ecosystem services, and trade-offs between policy goals. The endogenous institutional model possesses the potential to reveal nuanced emergent patterns with important consequences for land systems.
... But that hardly means voters will reward them. Consider research showing that public support for policy change moves "thermostatically" against the direction of policymaking, shifting leftward under Republican presidents making conservative policy moves and rightward under Democratic presidents making liberal policy moves (Wlezien 1995;2004;Erikson, et al 2002). These shifts lead voters to turn against the party of ambitious presidents that overshoot public demand for policy change (Erikson, et al 2002;Wlezien 2017). ...
Are policymakers rewarded in elections when they succeed in moving public policy in their ideological direction? Or do they face a thermostatic backlash, as citizens judge their policy moves as too hot or too cold? Our analysis of Congressional election outcomes since 1948 adds information on Congressional policy actions to traditional election models emphasizing the surge and decline of presidential support and referendums based on presidential approval and the economy. We find that voters react to the ideological direction of policy, voting against parties that push policy further to the left or the right in both midterm and presidential years. Even after accounting for policy and traditional explanations, however, there remains a large midterm penalty for the president's party.
... First, there is an extensive literature on how public opinion is formed (e.g., Erikson et al., 2002; see also Soroka and Wlezien 2010) and how voters' attitudes polarize (e.g., McCarty et al. 2006;Lenz, 2012;Ezrow et al., 2014;Bischof and Wagner 2019;Feddersen and Adams 2022). In this context, the "thermostatic" model by Wlezien (1995Wlezien ( , 1996 suggests that public opinion responds to government policy: when policy outcomes are to the left, the electorate's demand for rightward policies increases. More recently, Van Hauwaert (2023) demonstrates similarly that when immigration policies are more restrictive (permissive), the demand for these decreases (increases). ...
... However, this latter mechanism would struggle to explain why, after two terms, incumbent-parties no longer appear to wield any advantage. 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). ...
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.
... Carattini et al. 2017;Douenne and Fabre 2020), increases in PT fares (Somma et al. 2021), or plans to expand public transport networks without considering the needs of rural populations (Hürlimann 2007). These examples, and also a wealth of theoretical and empirical literature on how mass public opinion influences policy-making (Culpepper 2011;Wlezien 1995;Soroka and Wlezien 2010;Schakel et al. 2020), strongly suggest that changes in the PT system are more likely to be successful if they are in line with prevailing preferences amongst the population, both in their role as citizens and PT users (consumers). This is particularly the case in direct democratic contexts, such as Switzerland, where citizens hold extensive rights to support or veto policy changes (Stadelmann-Steffen 2011;Tsebelis 2002), and where voters have in fact prevented changes in the PT system, at least in part due to concerns over an uneven distribution of benefits (Hürlimann 2007). ...
The twin challenge of increasing capacity to accommodate growing travel demand while simultaneously decarbonizing the transport sector places enormous pressure on public transport (PT) systems globally. Arguably the most fundamental policy choice and trade-off in designing and operating PT systems in the coming years will be service levels versus cost implications. On the presumption that public (citizen and consumer) opinion is crucial to making such choices, we study this question with a focus on Switzerland by using a factorial experiment (n = 1'634) that considers the frequency and geographic coverage of PT services as well as the cost implications for PT users and taxpayers. We find that support for increased frequency of connections and more services to peripheral regions is high as long as such service expansion is funded mainly by the government, rather than PT users. Preferences are generally consistent across subgroups, except in the case of government funding, where preferences differ by political orientation. This suggests that there is substantial demand across the board for PT services expansion funded primarily by the government, but that the question of funding is also potentially politically the most controversial. While our findings are specific to a country with a highly developed PT system, our research provides a template for similar research in other countries that struggle with a similar challenge.
... We could simply assume that politicians remain unbothered by, and do not care about public opinion polls. But this notion contradicts many studies on political representation, which have shown that politicians tend to follow public opinion daily (Wlezien 1995) and admit that their approval impacts their day-to-day work (Oleskog Tryggvason 2020). After all, public approval polls are the most accurate predictor of the election outcome, especially closer to elections (Jennings and Wlezien 2018). ...
Recent studies indicate that politicians' negativity usage fails to enhance their approval ratings among the general public, yet politicians regularly use it. This begs the following question: why are politicians so negative if this strategy does not bolster their prospects for re-election? In this paper, I argue that the media, driven by audience engagement, plays a pivotal role in shaping politicians' propensity for negativity. Specifically, politicians resort to negativity because it aligns with the media's negativity bias, thereby increasing their chances of securing media access and public attention. I test this expectation on the less-likely case of Belgium, using data on politicians' negativity usage in parliament and their presence in prime-time TV news (2010-2020). The results show that using negativity significantly increases politicians' chances of gaining media access, particularly when using uncivil negativity. The more media access politicians start to attract due to negativity, the more they resort to negativity.
... More generally, mass public opinion can act as an important boundary condition shaping what policy-makers can (or cannot) do (Wlezien, 1995;Soroka and Wlezien, 2010). In view of the few cases of actually implemented road pricing and the various failures of such attempts, it is thus important to better understand whether and how road pricing schemes could be designed in ways that would make them acceptable to the mass public. ...
Road based motorised transport has many important societal benefits but also results in various negative environmental externalities such as CO 2 emissions or noise and local air pollution. Road pricing is widely regarded as an efficient and effective policy instrument for mitigating these externalities. In reality, however, it is politically controversial because it is associated with high opportunity costs and concerns over distributional effects. We examine whether and how designing road pricing in particular ways could help in achieving public support by implementing a conjoint experimental design using original data from a large, population-representative survey in Switzerland. Additionally, we test whether providing information about environmental benefits of road pricing increase support. We find that support for road pricing tapers off quite strongly when policy designs approach cost levels required for substantive mitigation of externalities and that preferences are robust against experimental manipulation. On the other hand, redistributing revenues towards public transport and green infrastructure increases support substantively at lower cost levels. The findings suggest that there are limits to how policy design and environmental communication can help overcome political feasibility barriers for road pricing. One should therefore focus on additional aspects to increase support such as policy sequencing.
Seminal models in political economy imply that rising economic inequality should lead to growing public demand for redistribution. Yet, existing empirical evidence on this link is both limited and inconclusive – and scholars regularly doubt it exists at all. In this research note, we turn to data from the International Social Survey Programme's (ISSP) Social Inequality surveys, now spanning the period from 1987 to 2019, to reassess the effect of rising inequality on support for redistribution. Covering a longer time series than previous studies, we obtain robust evidence that when income inequality rises in a country, public support for income redistribution tends to go up. Examining the reaction across income groups to adjudicate between different models of how rising inequality matters in a second step, we find that rising inequality increases support for redistribution within all income groups, with a marginally stronger effect among the well‐off. Our results imply that insufficient policy responses to rising inequality may be less about absent demand and more about a failure to turn demand into policy, and that scholars should devote more attention to the latter.
This chapter starts with analyzing whether we should worry about the possibility of existential risk. In the subsection about the complex system approach to political instability, several issues, namely terrorism, social unrest, and migration, are discussed. Finally, a short system-theoretical analysis implies that democracies do better than autocracies.
In October 2020, the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. introduced “Title 42” as an effort to stop the spread of COVID-19 by halting almost all forms of immigration. This policy is a clear illustration of the link between immigration and perceived disease contagion, and the association is not new. There is, in fact, a longstanding literature on the relationship between “contagion threat” and attitudes towards immigration. How might these attitudes shift in light of the COVID-19 pandemic? This study uses a two-wave panel survey of immigration attitudes (Wave 1 in October 2019 before COVID-19 and Wave 2 in April 2020 during lockdowns in the US) and finds some important shifts in attitudes. We find no evidence that underlying support for immigration was changed by the pandemic. That said, Democrats worried about the threat of COVID-19 increasingly supported lower levels of immigration, and Republicans worried about the threat of COVID-19 were more likely to support financial relief for immigrants. The pandemic is thus a timely illustration of the connection between immigration and contagion threat.
With participation in electoral politics limited, asylum seekers rely on lobbying to influence policy, but the factors which facilitate or constrain this process remain unclear. I interview asylum rights lobbyists in Germany and the United Kingdom to study the effects of lobbying institutions, using process tracing to identify influence mechanisms. Contrary to previous research, I find that successful lobbying stems from the quality not the quantity of institutions. I show how Germany’s corporatist institutions provide stable lobbying structures, building trustful working relationships. This enables collaborative policymaking and increases opportunities for influence. Informal, inconsistent structures in the United Kingdom’s pluralist system impair trust, reducing collaborative policymaking and influence. UK institutions are more policy responsive, however, enabling groups to capitalise on favourable public opinion, whereas the German system remains stable. The results demonstrate the effects of institutional arrangements and identify mechanisms which can improve policy outcomes for asylum seekers and other disadvantaged groups.
In this article, I argue that increasing inequality should have an impact on public opinion which balances the impact of military spending in the United States. Using the so‐called “guns versus butter trade‐off” argument, I show that, as inequality increases between those at a lower income level and those at the upper end of income, the public may view social spending as too small and military spending as too large. In response, the public should act less favorably to expenditure on the military. An empirical test of the effect of inequality on public support (since the 1980s) of military spending, in which I employ public opinion data, confirms my expectations: widening inequality engenders a negative impact on public support for defense expenditures.
Research on populist attitudes and populist leaders’ narratives has largely overlooked what happens to populist attitudes after a populist is elected, especially among the populist’s supporters. Existing literature points to two possible directions of change. On one hand, if populist attitudes stem from a perceived lack of representation, then we would expect people’s populist attitudes to decrease once their preferred candidate is in power. On the other hand, scholars have observed that populist politicians in power continue to deploy populist rhetoric, suggesting that their supporters’ populist attitudes should stay constant or even increase. In this project, the author focuses on Donald Trump and his supporters to explore this mechanism. Drawing on a national survey conducted around the 2016 and 2020 elections, the author shows that Trump’s supporters saw a significant decrease in populist attitudes after he came into power compared with both other American voters and other Republicans. The author also demonstrates that this decrease in populist attitudes is associated with changes in the level of “feeling represented.” On the basis of these findings, the author argues that populist attitudes are driven by feelings of lack of representation over other mechanisms.
Background and Purpose
In public health emergencies, rapid perception and analysis of public demands are essential prerequisites for effective crisis communication. Public demands serve as the most instinctive response to the current state of a public health crisis. Therefore, the government must promptly grasp and leverage public demands information to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of health emergency management, that is planned to better deal with the outbreak and meet the medical demands of the public.
Methods
This study employs dynamic topic mining and knowledge graph construction to analyze public demands, presenting a spatial-temporal evolution analysis method for emergencies based on EBU models. EBU models are three large language models, including ERNIE, BERTopic, and UIE.
Results
The data analysis of Shanghai’s city closure and control during the COVID-19 epidemic has verified that this method can simplify the labeling and training process, and can use massive social media data to quickly, comprehensively, and accurately analyze public demands from both time and space dimensions. From the visual analysis, geographic information on public demands can be quickly obtained and areas with serious problems can be located. The classification of geographical information can help guide the formulation and implementation of government policies at different levels, and provide a basis for health emergency material dispatch.
Conclusion
This study extends the scope and depth of research on health emergency management, enriching subject categories and research methods in the context of public health emergencies. The use of social media data underscores its potential as a valuable tool for analyzing public demands. The method can provide rapid decision supports for decision-making for public services such as government departments, centers for disease control, medical emergency centers and transport authorities.
Subnational variations in political culture and policy attitudes are a hallmark feature of multilevel systems of government, yet we know comparatively little about how and why citizens of these systems subjectively perceive regional differences in political values. Using data from a specially commissioned survey under the auspices of the Provincial Diversity Project, this article analyses subjective perceptions of difference across provinces in Canada. It shows that individuals believe their regions have distinct political values, but also that they systematically overestimate that difference. In their estimations of regional distinctiveness, individuals are informed by the value profiles of the regions in which they live, but also by their own policy preferences. The findings clarify the salience of internal boundaries within multilevel or federal states, and enable us to understand how myths of distinctiveness flourish, but also provide an important extension on debates about misperceptions in politics.
Pre-election polls are published continuously, particularly in the run-up to elections. Increasingly, polls are commissioned by the media and gain traction through their propagation on social media. But polls differ along many dimensions, including in their estimated vote shares and the corresponding portrayal of the state of public opinion. We rely on recent evidence to argue that these factors are likely to affect people’s willingness to share polls with their networks. To test this claim, we conduct two studies. In the first, we expose Spanish voters to a random selection of recent, real, 2023 general election vote intention polls. In the second, a conjoint analysis presents US voters with abstract, hypothetical 2024 presidential election polls. Across both studies, we find no evidence of any effect of polling firms, fieldwork dates, or sample sizes on intentions to share polls. Above all, our results suggest that the main factor consistently affecting voters’ proclivity to share polls is the result of the poll itself. Our findings are consistent with the literature that suggests that voters’ reception of poll results is usually driven by directional goals, and may have significant implications in light of the unique epistemic value of reposting on social media.
Does becoming poorer always cause people to shift their attitudes towards higher demand for redistribution? Through a systematic review of the literature on this question, we reveal five important themes in existing research: a person’s current income, their future expectations, their expectations about redistribution benefits, their income in early life and their attitudes towards beneficiaries. Identifying these themes helps explain why responses to economic hardship are variable and heterogeneous, and can very usefully guide future research.
While there is a strong cross-sectional association between social class and political attitudes, recent research—based on longitudinal data—finds that changes in class are, at most, weakly related to changes in such attitudes. One common explanation for this finding is that early life socialization affects both social class and political attitudes and that class has little, if any, direct effect on them. In this manuscript, we explore an alternative explanation that centers on the importance of cumulative class experiences for the long-term evolution of attitudes. To evaluate this perspective, we leverage data from the British Household Panel Survey, which contains measures of economic values that span up to 16 years, as well as complete work-life histories of respondents that allow us to track individual class experiences over people’s life span. Our findings show that cumulative class experiences are strongly associated with the development of economic values.
Researchers have long sought to make generalizable conclusions about the relationship between conspiracism and political identities. However, this literature remains deeply conflicted. The “extremity hypothesis” argues that, due to the psychology of extremism, individuals who identify as extremely left or right wing should display higher levels of conspiracism than centrists. But the “asymmetry hypothesis” argues that, due to the psychology of conservatism, individuals who self‐identify as right wing should display higher levels of conspiracism than those identifying as centrists or left wing. Here, we attempt to reconcile these competing hypotheses and the empirical findings supporting them. First, we demonstrate that the inconsistent findings stem from research designs that cannot support generalizable conclusions about the relationship between conspiracism and political identities. Second, we reexamine the most prominent studies supporting the extremity and asymmetry hypotheses. We find that they suffer from inappropriate measurement and modeling strategies, rendering their conclusions suspect. We then test the extremity and asymmetry hypotheses by reexamining 18 U.S. surveys (2012–21; n = 32,056) and examining new surveys from 18 countries (2022; n = 18,033). In total, our 77 samples spanning a decade and 27 countries ( n = 161,492) provide only weak support for either hypothesis. The wide variability in our findings suggests that differences in the relationship between conspiracism and political identities across political and temporal contexts do not stem from sampling variability, but rather from systematic forces that impact ideology, conspiracism, or both. We conclude that there is no single functional form that universally characterizes the relationship between conspiracism and political orientations across countries, or even over time within countries.
Objective
This study aims to test whether the American public is polarized and/or parallel in its assessments of the most important problem.
Methods
We use compositional time series models and new data on public opinion to test for differences between subgroups.
Results
We find inconsistent evidence of polarization for some issue areas but not others and remarkably robust evidence of parallel reactions across subgroups to economic and international shocks.
Conclusion
The U.S. public is remarkably consistent in terms of its assessments of the most important problem and in how subgroups shift their perceptions of issue importance in reaction to changing circumstances.
What drives partisan competition over the pursuit of legislative majorities in contemporary congressional elections? While conventional wisdom suggests that the chances of a legislative majority is largely predicated on the public’s ideological policy preferences or national standing of the president, there is little work assessing the dynamics of partisan competition over the course of the electoral cycle. Leveraging over 60 years of new generic congressional ballot data measuring the monthly preference of the mass public’s partisan presence for the congressional majority, this paper finds that partisan competition for the majority largely centers on the national policy mood and the public perception of presidential performance rather than partisan conflict. This paper validates the importance of these findings relating to partisan competition for the legislative majority by showing that this electoral competition plays a significant role in predicting the national normal popular vote and partisan seat turnover from 1960 to 2020.
The rise of economic inequality in the UK over the past four decades raises serious questions about the state of political equality in Britain. In this article, we analyse changes in political equality from voter participation to voting behaviour to the descriptive and substantive representativeness of Parliament. We find that voter participation in the electoral process has become substantially more unequal since the 1960s but that traditional geographic patterns of voting, where wealthier constituencies typically voted Conservative, have almost entirely vanished. Descriptively, Parliament has become more reflective in demographic and socio-economic terms of the population. In terms of substantive representation, policymaking in Britain has been more responsive to the interests of older homeowners than younger, less wealthy groups. Almost all British citizens nonetheless feel less represented by politicians and policymaking than they did several decades ago.
The academic agenda for studying social media and politics has been somewhat haphazard. Thanks to rapid technological change, a cascade of policy-relevant crises, and sheer scale, we do not have a coherent framework for deciding what questions to ask. This Element articulates such a framework by taking existing literature from media economics and sociology and applying it reflexively, to both the academic agenda and to the specific case of politics on YouTube: the Supply and Demand Framework. The key mechanism, traced over the past century, is the technology of audience measurement. The YouTube audience comes pre-rationalized in the form of Likes, Views and Comments, and is thus unavoidable for all actors involved. The phenomenon of 'radicalization' is best understood as a consequence of accelerated feedback between audiences and creators, radicalizing each other. I use fifteen years of supply and demand data from YouTube to demonstrate how different types of producers respond more or less to this feedback, which in turn structures the ideological distribution of content consumed on the platform. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Objective
We analyze how economic shocks affect the partisan nature of budgetary trade‐offs and use data from the U.S. Census Annual Survey of Government Finance to illustrate it.
Methods
We propose a compositional approach to model trade‐offs among 10 budgetary categories across both time and space in U.S. states.
Results
We find support for the notion that partisanship drives the allocation of budgetary expenditures. However, during times of negative economic shocks, either within a state or in neighboring states, Democratic and Republican governors have a similar budgetary response.
Conclusions
The results show the effects of economic and political shifts, as well as the implications of spillovers from other states, on partisan decisions about trade‐offs in government budgets.
This chapter builds on earlier work (Franklin 2022) that explored the mechanism tying the evolution of party choice at the individual level to evolving election-level turnout rates. It employs CSES surveys from 22 countries over the course of 3 to 5 elections. It builds on past findings that used error correction models to confirm the role of negative feedback in maintaining equilibrium rates of party support; and elaborates on a parallel mechanism that helps to maintain an equilibrium level of turnout, through voter reactions to evolving levels of electoral competition. The chapter treats voter turnout, voter-party policy congruence, and party support as aspects of a single dynamic process at the party and individual levels, also helping to validate the dynamic account of turnout processes suggested in earlier work.
Este trabajo analiza la opinión ciudadana española del gasto en servicios públicos, relacionado con características sociodemográficas, valores y coyunturas económico-políticas. El trabajo contribuye con: 1) a actualización del análisis hasta el periodo actual, incluyendo el periodo COVID y pos-COVID; 2) análisis de determinantes mediante el análisis de regresión multivariante; 3) estudio de la relación entre las valoraciones del gasto en servicios públicos y el gasto ejecutado, encontrando patrones marcados especialmente para educación y sanidad. Los resultados obtenidos resultan robustos, especialmente para valoraciones de las políticas de bienestar. Se apuntan cambios sociológicos importantes en la valoración de políticas públicas y se añade evidencia sobre el peso muy relevante de valores culturales («predisposiciones simbólicas») con respecto al «autointerés» para explicar la valoración del gasto público.
Political representation does not function well for citizens whose positions on political issues differ from those of elected representatives. In this paper, we argue that opinion incongruence leads citizens to want to bypass elected representatives and place more decision‐making power in the hands of the public. We theorise that this is because incongruent citizens are highly dissatisfied with the existing political system and/or think they will benefit from direct decision‐making in terms of improved policy responsiveness. Using data from the 2019 Belgian Election Survey ( n = 3413) and Party Leadership Survey, we find that greater incongruence between citizens’ positions and those of their elected representatives is related to higher support for direct decision‐making. This holds for opinion incongruence with the party voted for and incongruence with Parliament as a whole. This paper contributes novel insights into the consequences of the quality of political representation as well as the drivers of citizens’ support for direct decision‐making processes.
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
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The Paradox of Ignorant Voters, But Competent Electorate
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U.S. National Security Policy and the Soviet Union
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Budget Authority vs. Outlays as Measures of Budget Policy
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The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presiden-tial CampaignsThe Electoral Impact of Press Cover-age of the British Economy
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The American VoterThe Nature of Belief Systems in Mass PublicsPublic Opinion and Voting Behavior
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The Nerves of Government
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Threat, Public Opinion and Military Spending in the United States, 1930-1990
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From Outputs to Inputs: The Feedback of Budgetary Policy on Public Preferences for Spending
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