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Effects of Public Opinion on Policy
Abstract
The responsiveness of government policies to citizens' preferences is a central concern of various normative and empirical theories of democracy. Examining public opinion and policy data for the United States from 1935 to 1979, we find considerable congruence between changes in preferences and in policies, especially for large, stable opinion changes on salient issues. We present evidence that pubic opinion is often a proximate cause of policy, affecting policy more than policy influences opinion. One should be cautious, however, about concluding that democratic responsiveness pervades American politics.
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Citations
Cited by
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
Gilens, M., & Page, B. I. (2014) · Perspectives on Politics · doi:10.1017/s1537592714001595 · Cited by 2,700
Self-citationMoradi, R., & Groth, K. M. (2019) · International Journal of Hydrogen Energy · doi:10.1016/j.ijhydene.2019.03.041 · Cited by 1,390
van Oorschot, W. (2006) · Journal of European Social Policy · doi:10.1177/0958928706059829 · Cited by 1,327
Stimson, J. A., Mackuen, M. B., & Erikson, R. S. (1995) · American Political Science Review · doi:10.2307/2082973 · Cited by 1,316
What explains public support for climate policies? A review of empirical and experimental studies
Drews, S., & van den Bergh, J. C. J. M. (2016) · Climate Policy · doi:10.1080/14693062.2015.1058240 · Cited by 965
Metadata
- Authors
- Page, B. I., & Shapiro, R. Y.
- Venue
- American Political Science Review
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 1983-03
- Volume
- 77
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 175-190
- ISSN
- 0003-0554 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5943
- OpenAlex
- W1988323515
- Cited by
- 1,778
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 82.49
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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