The responsiveness of government policies to citizens' preferences is a central concern of various normative and empirical theories of democracy. Examining public opinion and policy data for the United States from 1935 to 1979, we find considerable congruence between changes in preferences and in policies, especially for large, stable opinion changes on salient issues. We present evidence that pubic opinion is often a proximate cause of policy, affecting policy more than policy influences opinion. One should be cautious, however, about concluding that democratic responsiveness pervades American politics.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1956018.pdf

Effects of Public Opinion on Policy

The Changing American Voter.

Understanding the processes of influence in societies has intrigued generations of scholars. One method of studying such influence in modern democracy is to investigate mass media, public, and policy agendas, defined as issues or events that are viewed at a point in time as ranked in a hierarchy of importance. Research by communication scholars and other social scientists has typically conceptualized either the mass media agenda, the public agenda, or the policy agenda as a dependent variable in order to explain how it is influenced by other factors. This chapter (1) analyzes past research on agenda-setting in order to learn where this research literature is deficient and where it is sufficient and (2) synthesizes this research literature with a view toward learning important theoretical and methodological lessons for future agenda-setting research.

Agenda-Setting Research: Where Has It Been, Where Is It Going?

This book attempts to redirect the field of voting behavior research by proposing a paradigm-shifting framework for studying voter decision making. An innovative experimental methodology is presented for getting 'inside the heads' of citizens as they confront the overwhelming rush of information from modern presidential election campaigns. Four broad theoretically-defined types of decision strategies that voters employ to help decide which candidate to support are described and operationally-defined. Individual and campaign-related factors that lead voters to adopt one or another of these strategies are examined. Most importantly, this research proposes a new normative focus for the scientific study of voting behavior: we should care about not just which candidate received the most votes, but also how many citizens voted correctly - that is, in accordance with their own fully-informed preferences.

How Voters Decide: Information Processing During Election Campaigns

Interest group ratings are widely used in studies of legislative behavior. Since the set of votes used is not constant over time and across chambers, the scales underlying the scores can shift and stretch. We introduce an econometric model that corrects the problem. Specifically, we derive an index, much like an inflation index for consumer prices, that allows one to make intertemporal and interchamber comparisons of interest group ratings. The adjusted scores for the ADA show a strong liberal trend in the average member of Congress during 1947–94, followed by a conservative reversal. A nonparametric test using ADA and ACU scores demonstrates the validity of adjusted scores and the invalidity of nominal scores for intertemporal and interchamber comparisons. Using two studies (Levitt 1996; Shipan and Lowry 1997) we illustrate that the choice of adjusted versus nominal scores may greatly affect substantive conclusions of researchers.

Comparing Interest Group Scores across Time and Chambers: Adjusted ADA Scores for the U.S. Congress

Public Opinion and American State Policy-Making

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Computer simulations of voting behavior

Computer Simulations of Voting Behavior

Supreme Court justices are overlooked, but important, national policy-making players who render final and consequential decisions in cases on economic conflicts. The research question asks what forces explain the decisional behaviour of Supreme Court justices in economic rights cases between a private and a public party. Theoretically, the decisional behaviour of an individual justice is a function of his or her notion as to what makes ‘good’ law, pursued in a cultural-collegial setting that is oriented by majoritarian requirements, while constrained by the legal nature of the case being considered. Empirically, all economic decisions made by Norwegian Supreme Court justices in five-justice panels from 1963 to 2012 are analyzed. Our multilevel model demonstrates that individual, collegial and case-level forces all contribute to explain the justices’ votes. These results suggest that case-related dynamics, such as who the plaintiff is or the amount of disagreement between justices, matter, but also that ideology – via appointment mechanisms – matters when a nation's high court justices decide economic cases. Understanding the foundational assumptions and the institutional procedures is vital when transporting judicial behaviour models across polities.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-9477.12060

Supreme Court Justices’ Economic Behaviour: A Multilevel Model Analysis

This study examines the sharing of public policy preferences between American state political party elites and party followers in the mass public on ten matters of state policy. Employing responses...

William R. Shaffer

Papers

Public Opinion and American State Policy-Making

Computer simulations of voting behavior

Computer Simulations of Voting Behavior

Supreme Court Justices’ Economic Behaviour: A Multilevel Model Analysis

Policy Preferences of Party Elites and Masses Conflict or Consensus