Do political parties listen to the(ir) public? Public opinion–party linkage on specific policy issues

Abstract

Political parties are a crucial link between the public and policy outcomes. However, few studies have considered who political parties are responsive to when they take positions on specific policy proposals. This article explores the links between public opinion and the policy positions of political parties on 102 specific policy proposals in Germany using a novel application of multilevel regression with poststratification to estimate the policy preferences of party supporters. While there is a link between general public preferences and the positions of political parties, this connection weakens considerably once political parties are in government. In fact, the study shows that the link between party positions and general public opinion is severed once parties enter government, whereas it is only weakened in the case of party supporters. Finally, the article finds mixed evidence for differences between niche parties and mainstream parties.

When Diversity Works: The Effects of Coalition Composition on the Success of Lobbying Coalitions

“…Passive "coalitions" in the form of lobbying camps favoring the same policy outcome (Baumgartner et al 2009;Klüver 2013;Mahoney and Baumgartner 2015) can be identified based on gathering the positions of all active actors on an issue. To enable the present study, an online survey was sent to 1,410 active advocates on 50 policy issues as part of the GovLis Project on government responsiveness 2 (Rasmussen, Mäder, and Reher 2018; see also Flöthe and Rasmussen 2019; Junk and Rasmussen 2019; Rasmussen and Reher 2019; Rasmussen, Reher, and Toshkov 2019;Romeijn 2018). Capturing, in addition to these, active cooperation between actors requires collecting even more information, some of which is private, as coalitions do not always leave traces.…”

“…Capturing, in addition to these, active cooperation between actors requires collecting even more information, some of which is private, as coalitions do not always leave traces. To enable the present study, an online survey was sent to 1,410 active advocates on 50 policy issues as part of the GovLis Project on government responsiveness 2 (Rasmussen, Mäder, and Reher 2018; see also Flöthe and Rasmussen 2019;Junk and Rasmussen 2019;Rasmussen, Reher, and Toshkov 2019;Romeijn 2018). This survey collected information on issue-specific "signaling coalitions," meaning coalitions that jointly campaigned in public or concertedly approached policy makers.…”

Party government and policy responsiveness. Evidence from three parliamentary democracies

“…But there could be advantages of looking into even more concrete party positions on policy issues in order to disentangle the effects of government preferences on policy changes and responsiveness (cf. Romeijn 2018). It is possible that the stronger effects of government preferences on policy change and on responsiveness can be found with more direct measures of party and government preferences.…”

“…To address this concern and explore the validity of the policy scale measures, we obtained direct measures of party support or opposition to the subset of 102 cases in Germany (Romeijn 2018). The direct measures were based on hand-coding of the party positions on the basis of statements in the national media.…”

Congruence between voters and parties: The role of party‐level issue salience

“…Some previous research has examined how voter-party congruence varies between different types of parties, with mixed results. Romeijn (2018) studies congruence between public opinion and political parties in Germany. He finds mixed evidence about the extent to which congruence varies between niche parties and mainstream parties, but, if anything, niche parties appear more congruent and more responsive to levels of policy support in the general public.…”