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Dynamic Representation(s): Federal Criminal Justice Policy and an Alternative Dimension of Public Mood

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Abstract

Does public policy respond to public opinion? Previous research suggests dynamic representation occurs in the aggregate. Yet, most of the evidence for policy response is limited to the policy intentions of elected officials on issues related to more or less government spending. We examine policy response to an alternative dimension of public mood, public preferences for more or less punitive criminal justice policies, using multiple indicators of policy from various stages of the policy-making process. Criminal justice policy should be responsive to public preferences given the public’s concern about crime and the negative social construction of criminals. Thus, there is an electoral incentive for public officials to respond to public preferences along this alternative dimension of public sentiment regarding criminal justice policy. We estimate a DYMIMIC model of federal criminal justice policy as a function of the multiple dimensions of public policy mood using Kalman filtering. The results indicate that criminal justice policy responds to the second, not the first, dimension of public mood. We find evidence that policy-makers at multiple stages of the policy process are able to differentiate among multiple signals from the public and respond appropriately. The results present a more sophisticated portrait of democratic responsiveness.

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Notes

  1. More recently, Stimson (2004) suggests that abortion may have evolved to be aligned with the more general domestic policy sentiment. All of the analyses about the effects of domestic policy mood, however, exclude abortion attitudes.

  2. By using the term “genuine” we are not suggesting that attitudes about crime are unresponsive to elite or media influence, but instead we refer to the notion that punitive preferences are related to core-values of morality and equality and have a relatively low probability of being constructed at the time of survey response. This leads some scholars to suggest that attitudes toward punishment are very stable and reluctant to capricious change (Ellsworth and Gross 1994).

  3. An exception to this claim is the work of Monroe (1998) showing a high degree of consistency between aggregate public opinion on foreign policy issues and public policy over time (also see Monroe 1979; Page and Shapiro 1983).

  4. Stimson et al. (1995), for instance, measure policy as legislative roll call votes, interest group ratings of those votes, the ideological slant of amicus briefs filed by the Solicitor General, and Supreme Court votes.

  5. See Walker (1993) for a discussion of the extensive discretion that police, prosecutors, and judges have traditionally enjoyed in the U.S. criminal justice system.

  6. Both policy mood measures (dimensions 1 and 2) are taken directly from Stimson (1999) and are available at http://www.unc.edu/~jstimson/time.htm.

  7. The crime index can also represent improvement in reporting practices (Nettler 1974) and changes in the seriousness of criminal activity (Skogan 1976).

  8. The technique is similar to a hidden Markov model with a continuous rather than discrete latent state variable with a Gaussian distribution. Readers who are interested in the details of the Kalman filter and the DYMIMIC model in particular should refer to the work of Beck (1989) and Kellstedt et al. (1996).

  9. We have estimated the model using racial policy preferences as the only indicator of public opinion as well as a simple bivariate model. In both instances the relationship between racial policy preferences and criminal justice policy is consistent with the results reported above.

  10. Four lags were determined to be appropriate based on the AIC, SBIC, and a Likelihood Ratio test. The estimates are from a VARX model controlling for all the variables shown in Table 1. The latter ensures the models are fully specified. Since the measure of the latent state of criminal justice policy is estimated (see Table 1), Granger causality tests were also conducted between each observed indicator and the second dimension of mood. None of these tests indicate that policy or presidential attention Granger causes public opinion.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, University of Missouri-Columbia, 217 Professional Building, Columbia, MO, 65211, USA

    Sean Nicholson-Crotty

  2. Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University, 4348 TAMU, College Station, TX, 77843-4348, USA

    David A. M. Peterson & Mark D. Ramirez

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  1. Sean Nicholson-Crotty
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Correspondence to Sean Nicholson-Crotty.

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Nicholson-Crotty, S., Peterson, D.A.M. & Ramirez, M.D. Dynamic Representation(s): Federal Criminal Justice Policy and an Alternative Dimension of Public Mood. Polit Behav 31, 629–655 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-009-9085-1

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