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Title: Dynamic Public Opinion and Policy Responsiveness in the American States

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2010

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Abstract: When public opinion changes, how closely do policies follow? Central to democratic theory, the principle of popular sovereignty implies some degree of dynamic policy responsiveness: new policies should be enacted when mass opinion becomes supportive of that new policy. But, for a successful democracy, public opinion must also be attentive to what government does; citizens have to react to policy changes otherwise there is little incentive for elected officials to respond to public opinion. While dynamic models of policy responsiveness have been tested at the national level, much less is known about the American states. This is an important shortcoming, particularly in light of evidence that state public opinion is directly responsible for policy differences across the fifty states. Moreover, because states differ in their institutional and political contexts, testing models of dynamic responsiveness at the state level provides many opportunities to specify the conditions when policy responsiveness is higher or lower. I advance our knowledge about dynamic policy responsiveness at the sub-national level by measuring the longitudinal variation in state public opinion on different policy areas and linking these measures to various policy outputs at the state level. Specifically, I show that multilevel regression coupled with imputation and post-stratification can be used to measure public opinion over time when augmented by a small (e.g., three year) moving average. I use this approach to estimate yearly state public opinion on global attitudes (e.g., party identification and ideology) as well as specific attitudes (e.g., the death penalty, abortion, education spending, welfare spending, and smoking bans). I then use these measures to explore the dynamic properties of state public opinion and to test models of policy responsiveness at the sub-national level. In regard to the former, I find that the dynamic pattern of public opinion varies across issues. For instance, preferences towards the death penalty, welfare spending, and anti-smoking legislation are dynamic with heterogeneous iv trends, preferences towards education spending are dynamic with homogeneous trends, and abortion attitudes are fairly stable. Through various time series analyses, I find that state opinion plays a critical role in policy changes at the sub-national level for three issue areas: education, welfare, and antismoking legislation. Moreover, I provide additional evidence that the impact of public opinion on policy is causal. To give just one example, I estimate that if support for education spending increases by three percentage points, spending per classroom increases by over $500 immediately (assuming 25 students per classroom). State opinion also plays a large role in whether a state adopts a new policy, such as a smoking ban in restaurants. I also find that the causal relationship between public opinion and policy is a two-way street, although how opinion responds to policy changes depends on the issue. For education and welfare, policy changes exhibited a negative relationship on public opinion, albeit, only in the long term. On the other hand, attitudes towards anti-smoking legislation become more supportive as states enact additional restrictions. These analyses suggest that state opinion responds in rational and reasonable ways to policy changes. The broader impacts of the study are embodied in the original dataset that is publicly available, along with the details of the methodology used to generate and validate dynamic measures of state public opinion. The methods of estimation can be extended to measure other preferences at the state level over time, as well as other attitudes such as tolerance, trust, efficacy or confidence which may also exhibit over time change across states.

Url: https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/files/final_submissions/2808

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Authors: Pacheco, Julianna

Institution: The Pennsylvania State University

Department: Political Science

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Other

Countries: United States