Inproceedings,
Political Institutions and the Opinion-Policy Link
European Consortium for Political Research Joint Session of Workshops, Switzerland, (2011)(ISSP).
Abstract
The link between public opinion and policy is of special importance in representative democracies. There is interest in policymakers’ responsiveness to public opinion. There also is interest in public responsiveness to policy itself. Only a small number of studies compare either policy or public responsiveness across political systems, however. Previous research has focused mostly on a handful of countries—the US, UK and Canada—that share similar cultures and electoral systems. It remains, then, for scholars to assess the opinion-policy connection across a broad range of contexts. This paper takes a first step in this direction, drawing on data from two sources: (1) public preferences for spending from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) and (2) measures of government spending from OECD spending datasets. These data
permit a panel analysis of 17 countries. We test theories about the effects of federalism, executive-legislative imbalance, and the proportionality
of electoral systems. The results provide evidence of the robustness of the ―thermostatic‖ model of opinion and policy but also the importance
of political institutions as mediators of the connections between them
