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Moving towards Monoculturalism? Public Preferences and Policy Outputs on Immigration in the Netherlands, 1978-2015

Representation
Immigration
Public Opinion
Armen Hakhverdian
University of Amsterdam
Alyt Damstra
University of Amsterdam
Armen Hakhverdian
University of Amsterdam

Abstract

Public control over policy outcomes plays a central role in democratic government. It remains an open empirical question, however, whether or not and under which conditions public opinion actually shapes public policy. In this paper we analyze these matters in the Netherlands, focusing on the policy domain of multiculturalism. The paper not only seeks to establish whether election outcomes and policy emanate from public preferences, but also how and under which conditions public influence impacts policymakers. The ‘dynamic representation’ framework provides analytical tools to analyze the opinion-policy link. It states that the electorate shapes policy by selecting policymakers and by altering the behavior of policymakers in office. We refine this framework by incorporating issue salience and uprooting it from its majoritarian origins to the Dutch multiparty context. We also disaggregate collective multicultural mood across education groups in order to assess whether or not policy responsiveness varies alongside this ever more apparent societal divide. In order to move beyond mere associations between public attitudes and elite behavior to actual causal claims of ‘who influences who’, longitudinal measures are indispensable. This, in turn, calls for extensive primary data collection. Annual measures of public opinion and policy in the realm of multiculturalism are collected going back to the 1970s. We combine information from a host of survey sources and complement this with various policy outputs in the issue domain. Employing time-series analyses we hope to shed new light on the conditions that facilitate or impede government responsiveness to public preferences.