Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: The Conditional Nature of Administrative Responsiveness to Public Opinion

主要研究者：丹尼斯·庄和朱莉娅·拉宾诺维奇题目：博士论文研究：行政回应公众舆论的条件性质。 0719506 AbstractThis project is one of the first to clearly study the theoretical and empirical relationship between public opinion and the policies of unelected administrative agencies across the U.S. states.这项研究将发展一种新的理论，解释立法监督这一连接立法机构和行政机构的主要机制如何影响行政决策，从而影响行政部门对公众舆论的反应。 从经验上讲，这项研究将探讨公众的政策偏好对州公用事业委员会制定的电信政策的影响。为了解决政策响应性的问题，本研究将在全国范围内对国民对电信管制政策的认识和态度进行具有代表性的抽样民意调查。这项研究有几个更广泛的影响。首先，调查将提供关于公民对监管政策的理解的数据，关于这个主题，该领域的理论和猜测比数据多得多。这些数据可用于评估政策是否符合公众当前的、不知情的偏好或潜在的偏好（公众在充分了解政策选择的情况下会有的偏好）。第二，调查是有用的其他比较制度和选举背景在美国各州的研究。调查将提供数据，以便研究党派冲突的激烈程度对行政回应的影响，以及当选和任命的公用事业专员在行政回应方面的差异。最后，这项调查将引起研究个人层面政治行为的学者的兴趣。各州政治条件的变化将使学者们能够研究制度和经济因素在态度形成过程中的作用，例如党派与无党派选举对个人党派与政策偏好之间关系的影响。此外，来自州民意调查的数据将提供一个机会，以检查公众的监管政策偏好和国家意识形态的标准措施，其中不包括监管政治的直接措施之间的关系。

Primary Investigators: Dennis Chong and Julia RabinovichTitle: Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Conditional Nature of Administrative Responsiveness to Public Opinion. 0719506AbstractThis project is one of the first to explicitly study the theoretical and empirical relationship between public opinion and the policies of unelected administrative agencies across the U.S. states. The research will develop a new theory that explains how legislative oversight, the main mechanism connecting legislative and executive institutions, affects both administrative policy-making and, consequently, administrative responsiveness to public opinion. Empirically, the study will examine the impact of the public's policy preferences on telecommunications policies enacted by state public utility commissions. To address the question of policy responsiveness, this research will conduct state-level representative sample public opinion surveys of citizens' knowledge of and attitudes toward telecommunications regulatory policies. This study has several broader impacts. First, the survey will provide data on citizens' understanding of regulatory policies, a topic on which the field has sufficiently more theory and speculation than data. The data can be used to assess whether policies are responsive to the public's current, uninformed preferences or their latent preferences (the preferences the public would have were it fully informed about policy choices). Second, the survey is useful to the study of other comparative institutional and electoral contexts in the American States. The survey will provide data that will make it possible to study the impact of the intensity of partisan conflicts on administrative responsiveness, and the differences in administrative responsiveness between elected and appointed public utility commissioners. Lastly, the survey will interest scholars who study individual-level political behavior. The variability of political conditions across states would allow scholars to examine the role of institutional and economic factors in the attitudes formation processes, such as the impact of partisan versus nonpartisan elections on the relationship between individuals' partisanship and their policy preferences. Moreover, the data from state public opinion surveys will provide an opportunity to examine the relationship between the public's regulatory policy preferences and the standard measures of state ideology, which do not include direct measures of regulatory politics.