Political Institutions and the Opinion-Policy Link
Political Institutions and the Opinion-Policy Link
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DOI：
10.1080/01402382.2012.713752
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发表时间：
2012-11-01
影响因子：
4.2
通讯作者：
Soroka, Stuart N.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Wlezien, Christopher;Soroka, Stuart N.
民意和政策之间的联系在代议制民主政体中特别重要。政策制定者对民意的反应至关重要。公众对政策本身的反应也是如此。然而，只有一小部分研究比较了政治系统中的政策或公共反应。此前的研究集中在少数几个文化和选举制度相似的国家--主要是美国、英国和加拿大。因此，学者们仍需在广泛的背景下评估意见与政策之间的联系。本文在这个方向上迈出了第一步，利用了两个来源的数据：(1)国际社会调查计划(ISSP)的公众支出偏好和(2)OECD支出数据集的政府支出衡量标准。这些数据允许对17个国家进行小组分析。本文对联邦制的影响、行政立法失衡、选举制度的比例等理论进行了检验。这些结果证明了观点和政策的“恒温”模型的稳健性，但也证明了政治机构作为它们之间联系的调节者的重要性。
The link between public opinion and policy is of special importance in representative democracies. Policymakers' responsiveness to public opinion is critical. Public responsiveness to policy itself is as well. Only a small number of studies compare either policy or public responsiveness across political systems, however. Previous research has focused on a handful of countries - mostly the US, UK and Canada - that share similar cultures and electoral systems. It remains, then, for scholars to assess the opinion-policy connection across a broad range of contexts. This paper takes a first step in this direction, drawing on data from two sources: (1) public preferences for spending from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) and (2) measures of government spending from OECD spending datasets. These data permit a panel analysis of 17 countries. The article tests theories about the effects of federalism, executive-legislative imbalance, and the proportionality of electoral systems. The results provide evidence of the robustness of the 'thermostatic' model of opinion and policy but also the importance of political institutions as moderators of the connections between them.