Are they listening? Public opinion,interest groups and government responsiveness

What is the role of interest groups in the transmission of issues between the public and government policy? While government responsiveness to voters has received widespread scholarly attention, little is known about the role of interest groups in the transmission of public opinion to government. It is argued here that interest groups importantly influence government responsiveness to public opinion, but that the effect varies by type of interest group: while cause groups increase the responsiveness of governments to their electorate, sectional groups decrease government responsiveness. Drawing on a new and unique dataset, this article examines the relationship between public opinion, interest groups and government expenditure across 13 policy areas in Germany from 1986 until 2012 and shows that interest groups indeed have a differential effect on the responsiveness of governments. The article’s findings have important implications for understanding political representation and the largely overlooked relationship between public opinion, interest groups and government policy.     

E-Government and the Transformation of Service Delivery and Citizen Attitudes

The impact of new technology on public-sector service delivery and citizens' attitudes about government has long been debated by political observers. This article assesses the consequences ofe-government for service delivery, democratic responsiveness, and public attitudes over the last three years. Research examines the content of e-government to investigate whether it is taking advantage of the interactive features of the World Wide Web to improve service delivery, democratic responsiveness, and public outreach. In addition, a national public opinion survey examines the ability of e-government to influence citizens' views about government and their confidence in the effectiveness of service delivery. Using both Web site content as well as public assessments, I argue that, in some respects, the e-government revolution has fallen short of its potential to transform service delivery and public trust in government. It does, however, have the possibility of enhancing democratic responsiveness and boosting beliefs that government is effective.     

An Investigation of the Public Deficts and Government Spending Relationship: Evidence for Greece

This paper tests the validity of the Buchanan-Wagner hypothesis for Greece, that increases in public spending are the result of the tolerance of large deficits over the period 1961–1994. To test this hypothesis, three unit-root pretests, the Dickey-Fuller, Phillips-Perron and Kwiatkowski et al. and maximum likelihood estimation techniques of cointegrating vectors and a vector error-correction model are employed. A long-run relationship is found to exist among government spending, deficit, income,wages and adult population and the importance of short-run deviations are presented. The empirical evidence suggests that Buchanan and Wagner hypothesis, seems to find support for Greece in the long-run and the short-run. Further, productivity in the public sector is lower than in the private sector and the growth of income is not an important determinant of the increase in the relative size of public spending.     

Responsive Government? Public Opinion and Government Policy Preferences in Britain and Denmark

The ability of a political system to respond to the preferences of its citizens is central to democratic theory and practice; yet most empirical research on government responsiveness has concentrated on the United States. As a result, we know very little about the nature of government policy responsiveness in Europe and we have a poor understanding of the conditions that affect cross-national variations. This comparative study examines the relationship between public opinion and policy preferences in the United Kingdom and Denmark during the past three decades. We address two key questions: First, are the government's policy intentions driven by public opinion or vice versa? Second, do political institutions influence the level of government responsiveness? We suggest that public opinion tends to drive the government's policy intentions due to the threat of electoral sanction, and that this is more pronounced in proportional systems than in majoritarian democracies.     

Estimating property tax base elasticity over time: Evidence on the revenue maximizing politician

The Laffer curve analysis suggests a possible policy conflict between short-run revenue maximization and long-run fiscal health. This paper estimates short-run and long-run property tax base elasticity in order to test whether such a conflict exists for the property tax in central cities. A stock adjustment model is used and separate time-series estimates for four New York State central cities lend empirical support to such a conflict. The results show that while disincentive effects associated with property tax rate increases are not strong enough to reduce proeprty tax revenue in the short-run, they are substantial enough to reduce long-run revenue in all but one city. The paper also tests for asymmetric response to property tax rate changes and finds significant results for only one city.     

The European Union and Greece: Political Acceptability and Financial Transfers

In this paper a conceptual model is developed that relates loyalty to a community of countries to the material benefits derived from it, measured by the transfer of extra income. We argue that the extent of a country's welfare, and consequently its acceptance to participate in a community increase together with the latter's scope for influence on the former. We use the paradigm of Greece, which is one of the main recipient countries in the EU. It was found that financial transfers concerning regional policy affect in the long-run 'the acceptance of European integration' by the public in Greece while social policy funds appear to have short-run positive effects on public opinion.     

Authoritarian responsiveness: Online consultation with “issue publics” in China

In recent years, public consultation has become a standard feature of policymaking in authoritarian regimes. While previous studies found evidence of government responsiveness to citizens' demands, they did not measure responsiveness in terms of real policy change. This article presents the first systematic analysis of Chinese central government policy responsiveness to consultative input. In 2008, the Chinese government unveiled a blueprint for health‐care reform, inviting the public to post their opinions online. Having collected 27,899 online comments, the government subsequently published a revised draft. This article analyzes a random sample of 2% of this corpus of comments, assessing the effect of comments on revisions while controlling for both media content and bureaucratic preferences. The findings demonstrate that public comments have an impact upon policy revisions and suggest that the Chinese government is more responsive to street‐level implementers than to other social groups.     

Federal legislative activism in Australia: a new approach to testing Wagner’s law

This paper considers the relationship between government growth and real GDP per capita by developing models of federal legislative output in Australia since 1901. Growth in legislation is found to be negatively related to growth in real income per capita in the short-run, implying that legislation responds to temporary economic shocks, but without a robust long-run relationship with the level of income. The growth in the number of pages of legislation enacted and legislative complexity also show a negative short-run relationship with growth in real national income per capita and a positive long-run relationship with the level of income.     

Dynamics of Regulatory Policymaking in Sweden: The Role of Media Advocacy and Public Opinion

While extensive literatures study the responsiveness of policy to public opinion and the influence of interest groups, few studies look at both factors simultaneously. This article offers an analysis of the influence of media advocacy and public opinion on political attention and policy change for four regulatory issues over a relatively long period of time in Sweden. The data pools together measures of public support for specific policies with new data on attention to the policy issues in the Swedish parliament, policy developments over time and detailed coding of the claims of interest advocates in two major Swedish newspapers. Analyzing this data, a complex picture without a general tendency for either public opinion or media advocacy to act as dominant forces in producing policy change is revealed, although some evidence is found that the public is successful in stimulating political attention when it supports policy proposals aimed at changing the status quo.     

Recessions and social classes: Economic impacts and political opinions

Economic classes represent groupings of individuals in terms of some long-run distribution of economic advantages. Recessions and inflations impose unequal short-run costs which may or may not be congruent with class inequalities. This paper begins with the hypothesis that the class structure channels the personal impacts of macroeconomic fluctuations and helps to explain the opinion formation process which underlies any observed political response. The empirical puzzle involves properly specifying and implementing a test of this hypothesis.I outline two alternative conceptions of social stratification: one emphasizing individualistic competition for places in a continuously rankedstatus system, and the other focusing on patterned inequalities arising in the productive process and resulting in a discontinuous distribution ofclasses. The two are only modestly related empirically.The analysis section of the paper shows that status and class covary in distinctive ways with measures of financial condition and political opinion. The paper suggests that earlier research based on continuous indexes of social status may have erred in concluding that stratification is irrelevant to short-run fluctuations in political opinion.     

Representation,agendas and institutions

Dynamic agenda representation can be understood through the transmission of the priorities of the public onto the policy priorities of government. The pattern of representation in policy agendas is mediated through institutions due to friction (i.e., organisational and cognitive costs imposed on change) in decision making and variation in the scarcity of policy makers' attention. This article builds on extant studies of the correspondence between public priorities and the policy activities of government, undertaking time‐series analyses using data for the United States and the United Kingdom, from 1951 to 2003, relating to executive speeches, laws and budgets in combination with data on public opinion about the ‘most important problem’. The results show that the responsiveness of policy agendas to public priorities is greater when institutions are subject to less friction (i.e., executive speeches subject to few formal rules and involving a limited number of actors) and declines as friction against policy change increases (i.e., laws and budgets subject to a greater number of veto points and political interests/coalitions).     

Political Institutions and the Opinion–Policy Link

The link between public opinion and policy is of special importance in representative democracies. Policymakers’ responsiveness to public opinion is critical. Public responsiveness to policy itself is as well. Only a small number of studies compare either policy or public responsiveness across political systems, however. Previous research has focused on a handful of countries – mostly 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. The article tests 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 moderators of the connections between them.     

Taking official positions: How public policy preferences influence the platforms of parties in the United States

Do political parties in the United States respond to public opinion when writing their official party platforms? Current research suggests a clear linkage between public opinion and party positions, with parties responding to public preferences, and public opinion responding to party messages. Drawing on existing research regarding the saliency/issue competition model of party position-taking, this study examines the specific effect of public opinion on party positions, positing that when a larger percentage of the public views a particular issue area as important, political parties will discuss that issue area to a greater degree in their official election platforms. To test this theoretical construct, we rely on public opinion data collected by Gallup, and normalized by the Policy Agendas Project, from 1947 through 2011, combined with content analyzed data regarding both the Republican and Democratic platforms from 1948 through 2012. Using OLS regression with a Prais-Winsten transformation and panel-corrected standard errors, we find support for the hypothesis that political parties discuss, in their platforms, issue areas that the public views as more important. Further, we find that this responsiveness does not appear to vary across political parties. These findings have important implications for our understandings of both political party dynamics and party representation in the United States. Moreover, these findings allow us to assess the health of American democracy.     

Reinvention and retrenchment: Lessons from the application of the New Zealand model to Alberta,Canada

Is New Zealand a model for “reinventing” government and cutting spending? The government of Alberta, Canada, consciously replicated significant elements of the New Zealand model to attain fiscal balance and public sector reorganization, including the core element of restructuring institutions to change individual behavior. Despite broad similarities in policy content and outcome, differences in the specific content of policy and the politics of policy implementation led to differences in the sustainability of reform and the location of budget cuts. Alberta's Progressive Conservative party emphasized expenditure cuts where both the New Zealand Labour and National parties emphasized government reorganization and the introduction of market mechanisms. Contrasting these efforts to balance budgets and reinvent government suggests that there is considerable variation in the “model,” and that left governments in general are probably more likely to pursue and succeed at the reinvention of government, while stinting fiscal balance. Right governments, on the other hand, are more likely to achieve short-run fiscal balance at the expense of successful reinvention. In turn this suggests that while the partisan orientation of the reforming party matters, neither has an ideal policy mix for long-term fiscal stability. Alternation of governments may provide the best policy mix.     

Public employment and the double role of bureaucrats

Bureaucrats in the government sector have a double role since they are both suppliers and demanders of public employment; they are publicly employed (supply labor) and they have an important say in deciding the size of the municipal employment (demand labor). In this paper we present and estimate a theoretical model that focuses on this double role of bureaucrats. The predictions from the theoretical model are supported by our empirical results: The estimates, based on data from Swedish municipalities 1990–2002, show that wages have smaller effects on the demand for bureaucrats than on the demand for other types of public employees. Actually, wages have no significant effect on the number of bureaucrats the municipality employs.     

Assessing the Effects of Public Participation

This article presents the results of research designed to test participatory democracy assertions that high-quality public participation can affect participants' beliefs in desirable ways. It examines the relationships between exposure to quality participation and participant beliefs about the trustworthiness and responsiveness of a public agency and the value of including different viewpoints in public meetings. After participation in quality project meetings, participants were significantly more likely to believe the agency was responsive to public concerns. The results indicate that some specific aspects of quality participation are positively associated with expectations about the agency's responsiveness and performance. Positive associations were also found with tolerance for differences of opinion. These results have important implications for public administrators and theorists of participatory democracy.     

Government growth and private contributions to charity

We exploit the time-series properties of charitable giving to provide additional insights into the relationship between charitable contributions and government spending. Cointegration tests reveal a significant long-run relationship between several categories of charitable giving and government spending. Granger causality tests provide evidence on the short-run giving and spending relationship. Evidence suggests that charitable contributions to education respond quite differently to state and local government education expenditures versus federal government expenditures. We argue that the government spending and charitable giving relationship depends on the source of government revenue, how this revenue is used, and the rational ignorance of private donors.     

Lockbox Government: Segregated Funding Strategies and the Decline of Governmental Flexibility

Proponents of "reinvention" assert that it will produce governments that are more agile, better able to adapt to rapidly changing conditions, and able to produce public services at much lower cost. However, attempts to make government "work better and cost less" have had limited success. Policy-makers have consequently invested their creative energy in another class of institutional innovations: segregated funding strategies, which protect agencies and programs from the impact of fiscal restraint by excluding them from normal budgeting processes. The proliferation of budget "lockboxes" may actually introduce new rigidities into the public sector and erode democratic influence in policy-making. On the other hand, there may be some circumstances in which these devices can be justified as a method of ensuring that critical long-run interests receive appropriate attention.     

Application Districts: An Emerging Spatial Form in the Computer Software Industry

This paper presents a stylized theory of the geography of the computer software industry. It is timely because countries around the world, and at different stages of development, have targeted that industry for attention because of its growth and stability, and the quality of the jobs it provides. I demonstrate that the software industry is decentralizing away from the centers that were first established in the 1970s, but there is no process of de-concentration underway. Old clusters are losing their share of national employment, but they are being replaced by new clusters, and not by a generalized dispersal of the industry. I explain this pattern in terms of a spatial division of labor emerging in the software industry. This division is not based on a low-skill/high-skill labor dichotomy, as in high tech manufacturing, but on a distinction within high-skilled labor between those working on general-purpose technology and those developing applications for specific uses. I call the new clusters where specialized applications are developed application districts.     

Penal Populism and the Public Thermostat: Crime,Public Punitiveness,and Public Policy

This article makes the case that feedback processes in democratic politics—between crime rates, public opinion, and public policy—can account for the growth of penal populism in Britain. It argues that the public recognize and respond to rising (and falling) levels of crime, and that in turn public support for being tough on crime is translated into patterns of imprisonment. This contributes to debates over the crime–opinion–policy connection, unpacking the dynamic processes by which these relationships unfold at the aggregate level. This uses the most extensive data set ever assembled on aggregate opinion on crime in Britain to construct a new over‐time measure of punitive attitudes. The analysis first tests the thermostatic responsiveness of punitive attitudes to changes in recorded crime rates as well as self‐reported victimization, and then examines the degree to which changes in mass opinion impact on criminal justice policy.