Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: The Impact of Expectations of Legislative Processes on Legitimacy Perceptions

在很大程度上，代表权是有效的。民意在大多数情况下推动政策产出和变化。然而，许多公民认为，不能相信代表会回应公众的需求和利益。本文考察了人们对立法程序的期望的来源和内容，以帮助调和这一明显的矛盾。发展了一种民意理论；这一理论的基础是越来越多的证据表明，人们对决策当局合法性的总体评价受到他们对程序公平的看法的影响。今天的大多数美国人都不相信立法程序是公正的。相反，许多公民认为，这一过程容易受到利益集团和商业组织的压力，因此，它在人们希望政府如何运作和他们认为政府确实有效之间造成了差异。尽管这是故事的一部分，但这种不一致本身并不能完全解释为什么这么多美国人对立法程序的合法性持怀疑态度。我认为，在对政府的广泛谴责背后，市场预期与政治预期之间的冲突日益加剧。在这一理论中，人们越来越多地期望立法过程具有市场所提供的同等程度的效率、责任和机会平等，尽管多元化的政府机制无法与这些经济理想相匹配。因此，这个项目的目标是证明，对政府的广泛反感背后是公民对立法程序的期望与多元民主制度要求内的可能性之间的根本不一致。这篇论文从两个方面进行了检验。首先，我使用了一项调查，其中包括麦克洛斯基和扎勒对美国人的观点和价值观的问题，以衡量资本主义和民主党的价值观。调查还包括来自全国选举研究的标准横截面的项目，以及我自己设计的问题。最后，从泰勒关于程序正义的工作中分离出假设的心理机制，并使用原始实验进行了分离。

Representation, for the most part, works. Public opinion drives policy output and change most of the time. Yet, many citizens believe that representatives cannot be trusted to respond to public needs and interests. This dissertation examines the sources and content of people's expectations of the legislative process to help reconcile this apparent contradiction. A theory of public opinion is developed; this theory is based on mounting evidence that people's overall evaluations of the legitimacy of decision-making authorities are influenced by their perceptions of procedural fairness. Most American today do not believe that the legislative process is impartial. Instead, many citizens believe that the process is susceptible to pressure from interest groups and business organizations, and, thus, it creates a discrepancy between how people want government towork and how they perceive that it does work. Although it is part of the story, this discordance by itself cannot explain fully why so many Americans are skeptical of the legitimacy of the legislative process. I content that underlying widespread condemnation of government is an increasing conflict of expectations of the market with those of poliitics. People, in this theory, increasingly expect from the legislative process the same degree of efficiency, accountability, and equality of opportunity that the perceive the market offers, even though pluralist mechanisms of government cannot match these economic ideals. Thus, the goal of this project is to demonstrate that underlying broad antipathy toward government is a fundamental inconsistency between citizens' expectations of legislative processes and what is possible within the institutional requirements of a pluralist democracy. This thesis is tested in two ways. First, I use a survey that includes questions from McClosky and Zaller's Opinions and Values of Americans Scale for Capitalist and Democratic Values. The survey also includes items from the standard cross-sections of the National Election Studies as well as questions of my own design. Finally, the postulated psychological mechanism derived from Tyler's work on procedural justice is isolated using an original experiment.