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Cited by 408

The DOI matches its OpenAlex record; 88 of the 88 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Bringing the Public Back In: Should Sociologists Consider the Impact of Public Opinion on Public Policy?

Paul Burstein·1998·Social Forces

Abstract

The struggle for democracy, central to Western politics for hundreds of years, is predicated upon the belief that democratic institutions give citizens considerable power over their government. Whether this belief is correct is a key question in the study of democratic politics. This article argues that this question is neglected by sociologists who examine the determinants of public policy; they neither address theories of democratic responsiveness nor assess the impact of public opinion on public policy. This neglect is problematic for two reasons: there is much evidence that public opinion strongly influences public policy, and there is reason to believe that adding public opinion to sociologists' empirical analyses of policy change would undermine some of their conclusions about the influence of other factors. Two ways of responding to these findings are presented.

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Metadata

Authors
Burstein, P.
Venue
Social Forces
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Published
1998-09-01
Volume
77
Issue
1
Pages
27-27
ISSN
0037-7732 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2164901722
Cited by
408
References
88
FWCI
37.49
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Bringing the Public Back In: Should Sociologists Consider the Impact of Public Opinion on Public Policy? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/sf/77.1.27
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Burstein, P. (1998). Bringing the Public Back In: Should Sociologists Consider the Impact of Public Opinion on Public Policy? Social Forces. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/77.1.27

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.