No abstract

Past research has shown that elected officials are generally responsive to the public's attitudes on policy, particularly in domains such as morality policy. But will this responsiveness survive an externally imposed, non-incremental policy “shock”? The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade represents such a shock regarding abortion policy. We examine the responsiveness of state lawmakers to mass abortion attitudes in the post-Roe period through a longitudinal analysis of state abortion policies. We find that the connection between mass abortion attitudes and abortion policies has grown stronger over time, and that mass preferences have become the primary determinant of such policies. Mass abortion attitudes are now a stronger predictor of abortion policies than elite abortion attitudes, and certain elite abortion attitudes that once moderated the link between mass abortion attitudes and policy no longer do so. These findings suggest that lawmakers will attempt to respond to public preferences about contentious morality policies despite the imposition of an external policy constraint.

No abstract

JohnMatsusaka raises important questions about the methodology we used in earlier work to assess the impact of the initiative process (Camobreco 1998;Lascher, Hagen, and Rochlin 1996). Statistical tools applied routinely can nevertheless be applied thoughtlessly, and Matsusaka's uncommon attention to the fit between method and substance merits careful consideration. We ourselves have benefited from thinking the issues through, and we are pleased to have this opportunity to make more explicit the underpinnings of our work.In the end, however, we believe that the criticism is off the mark and that our conclusions stand. The data and methods we have used are perfectly suited to test the null hypothesis to which we applied them: government policy is no more responsive to the electorate's preferences in states where ballot initiatives are permitted than in states where they are not. Our purpose in this note is to sketch our reasoning in more detail. Like Matsusaka, we conclude with some observations about the accumulated evidence on the value of ballot initiatives. Estimating ResponsivenessWe can address Matsusaka's critique best by expressing it formally. The heart of the matter is the theoretical relationship between the policy of a state government and the policy preferred by the state's electorate, represented by