This paper posits the idea of ‘democratic circuits’, in which the public sphere is able to manage and alter signals between citizens’ responsiveness, policy representation, and the public sphere. The ‘democratic circuits’ approach theorises socio-political context, and the public sphere more generally, as a crucial type of ‘resistor’, which can skew current signals between political outputs, such as policy-making, and inputs, such as citizens’ behaviours, and adversely affect the democratic circuit as a whole. This holistic approach enables us to fill in a major gap in the literature, which divides scholars working on opinion-policy models and scholars focusing on the role and impact of political and discursive contexts. We test our ‘democratic circuits’ model in the highly contentious field of ethnic-religious relations and in two countries with sizeable Muslim settlements, namely France and Great Britain. Both countries have long and deep colonial pasts tied to Islam, and have more recently experienced increasing levels of contentiousness through on-going challenge between Islamism and Islamophobia. This gives us, we argue, a unique chance to study a representative scenario of a highly loaded democratic circuit and the interplay between public opinion, policy, and the public sphere. Empirically, the study of these elements draws on and combines data from a diverse set of sources, allowing for an analysis since the early 1990s. This time-span is also sufficiently large to consider many critical events of Islam terror that have shaken France and Great Britain, either directly or indirectly. Our results suggest that the democratic responsiveness works under different assumptions and in a more context-specific manner than previous findings and literature lead to believe, thus supporting the ‘democratic circuits’ model.
