The Comparative Macropolity: Public Opinion, Government Policy and Responsiveness

The idea of democracy assumes policy respond to some degree to public opinion – public opinion affects who is in government, and this affects policy. We have theoretical expectations of what we should observe, following McGann and Latner (2014). In countries with majoritarian election systems, we would expect that changes in public opinion affect government composition, but with overshooting. In countries with simple PR parliamentary system we would expect rapid adjustment to changes in public opinion without the overshooting dynamic. In countries with supermajoritarian decision making (such as the USA or Germany), we would expect slow adjustment. This paper test this hypothesis by measuring the changes in public opinion in the Netherlands over the last 40 years and comparing this to changes in government spending. It uses the item response theory (McGann 2014) to create a measure of policy mood that is comparable over time from the myriad of survey questions asked over the last 40 years. It will then compare the patterns of responsiveness in the UK, the USA, the Netherlands and Germany, and test whether they match our theoretical expectations. We are also interested in the factors that shape public mood. Considering our cases, it appears that public mood changes rapidly in the face of crises. Certain policy options become unviable, while other that were previously improbable become thinkable. However there also appear to case of rapid change in public mood that are not connected with obvious crises. One explanation of this is a change in the positions of parties. If the party that “owns” a particular position abandons it (a u-turn) we might expect public support for that position to dwindle. We consider potential cases of this phenomenon in our four countries.