Stability and change in the opinion–policy relationship: Evidence from minimum wage laws

Abstract

Recent studies have documented large discrepancies between mass preferences and policies in U.S. states consistent with theories that highlight the oversized influence of affluent Americans on policymaking. In this note, we replicate and extend a recent such study (Simonovits, Guess, and Nagler, 2019) to assess how policy bias evolves in time. Specifically, relying on novel data and methods, we construct measures of minimum wage preferences and compare them to observed policies in each state for the years of 2014, 2016, 2019, and 2021. We demonstrate that, averaged across states, policy change closely tracked a pronounced increase in preferences for higher minimum wages, but the size of policy bias remained relatively stable. However, this national pattern hides an increasingly polarized policy landscape: in many states, insufficient responsiveness led to an increasing deviation between preferences and policies, while in other states policy changes—larger than preference changes—closed initial policy bias.

Welfare at the Statehouse Democracies: Assessing the Impact of Public Opinion on Welfare Policies at the State Level

“…The same could be true for the reason why state government ideology was only significant for TANF, since the more polarization surrounding this program may contribute for party ideology to have a larger role in its direction. This divergence of effects according to the type of policy may further explain other contradictory findings as why state public opinion does not affect state adoption of EITC (Franko & Witko, 2017), but impacts increases in the state minimum wage laws (Simonovits & Bor, 2023). Similarly, future analyzes can focus on the differences of opinion regarding more specifically eligibiltiy requirements for TANF and SNAP once although people may think the benefits are not generous enough, they may differ in how easily they think it is to quality for such programs.…”