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Public Opinion, Public Policy, and Democracy

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Handbook of Politics

Part of the book series: Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research ((HSSR))

Debates about the impact of public opinion on public policy are organized around a “should” and an “is.” Almost everyone agrees that in a democracy public policy should be strongly affected by public opinion. But there is a lot of disagreement about how strong the effect is. Is it as strong as it should be, meaning that the democratic political process is working well? Or is it much weaker, meaning that the democratic political process is working badly?

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Public policy may be thought of in terms of implementation, rather than laws or even expenditures. Unfortunately, there are relatively few studies of the impact of public opinion on implementation. Those who study implementation are often not interested in public opinion, while those who study public opinion are seldom interested in implementation (Burstein 1998b: ch. 6).

  2. 2.

    It's easy to understand why researchers would focus only on a few variables. Particularly when a line of research is new, it can be difficult enough to theorize about relationships and collect data for a handful of variables, without taking on additional burdens; see Page and Shapiro (1983) on public opinion and Gamson (1975) on social movements.

  3. 3.

    Many of these studies are problematic in ways already discussed, in terms of measurement, for example; but they do provide the soundest findings available.

  4. 4.

    As Kollman (1998: 162) writes, some of our findings about public opinion and other forces influencing policy are “hard to evaluate using a well-accepted standard of democracy.”

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Christopher Wlezien for his helpful advice and comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Paul Burstein

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

    Kevin T. Leicht

  2. Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    J. Craig Jenkins

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Burstein, P. (2010). Public Opinion, Public Policy, and Democracy. In: Leicht, K.T., Jenkins, J.C. (eds) Handbook of Politics. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-68930-2_4

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