Democracy's Denominator: Reassessing Responsiveness with Public Opinion on the National Policy Agenda.

ABSTRACT: Democratic responsiveness concerns the degree to which government policies match public preferences. Responsiveness studies typically use national surveys to characterize public opinion, but whether poll questions overlap with the policy agenda is unknown. The first of two empirical analyses presented here, with hundreds of issues on the national agenda in the United States from 1947 to 2000, reveals that public opinion is mostly unrelated to policy outcomes. The picture appears to be even more ominous-that is, opinion and policy are negatively related-on highly salient issues that attract media attention. A second study revisiting published work confirms that responsiveness patterns look different depending upon whether studies of opinion-policy connections (a) begin with survey data and

SUBMITTER: Barabas J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4888577 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature