By Stuart N. Soroka, Professor Christopher Wlezien
This ebook develops and checks a "thermostatic" version of public opinion and coverage, within which personal tastes for coverage either force and comply with adjustments in coverage. The illustration of opinion in coverage is primary to democratic thought and daily politics. So too is the level to which public personal tastes are educated and aware of alterations in coverage. The coexistence of either "public responsiveness" and "policy illustration" is therefore a defining attribute of winning democratic governance, and the topic of this publication. The authors research either responsiveness and illustration throughout more than a few coverage domain names within the usa, the uk, and Canada. the tale that emerges is one within which consultant democratic govt features unusually good, although there are very important ameliorations within the info. diversifications in public responsiveness and coverage illustration responsiveness are discovered to mirror the "salience" of the various domain names and governing associations - in particular, presidentialism (versus parliamentarism) and federalism (versus unitary government).
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Additional resources for Degrees of Democracy: Politics, Public Opinion, and Policy
Sample text
Of course, this rationality may be evident at the individual level as well. , Stimson 1989). But how does this group make an informed judgment? Generally, even the very well informed only have limited information about government. Some are experts in a particular area, say, the environment, and know a lot about what is happening in that area (Krosnick 1990; Hutchings 2003). They read a lot on the subject and frequently search for relevant information on the Web. Some may belong to interest groups.
And the same may be true for leaders of legislatures in presidential systems. That said, we remain agnostic about politicians’ use of polls. Whether and to what extent politicians actually use polls is largely irrelevant to us, and it is not critical to what we argue or show. To be clear: we are interested in policymakers’ responsiveness to public opinion, not polls per se. The latter provide information about the former, but they are not the same. And it may ultimately be that politicians generally do not follow the polls in decision-making but do follow public opinion.
Still, the thermostatic model requires more – that people acquire and process information about policy. We know that people don’t have copies of the federal budget on their coffee tables. ) crowd, or those political junkies from elsewhere. Few people read the New York Times or the Washington Post, and even these papers really only give us a glimmer of insight into what government is doing. Indeed, most Americans don’t read any kind of newspaper, and the situation is only a little better in Canada and the The process by which this might happen ultimately could be quite complex – see Chong and Druckman (2007).