The Determinants of Public Policy: What Matters and How Much

Abstract

This article is a research synthesis addressing four questions critical to our understanding of the determinants of public policy. How often and how strongly do hypothetical determinants of policy—public opinion, interest groups, the party balance, and other factors—actually influence policy? Do some hypothetical determinants of policy have more influence than others? Does the way we measure policy affect our ability to explain it? And is there a connection between how strongly particular variables affect policy, and how much effort we devote to studying them? It turns out that variables hypothesized to influence policy more often than not have no effect. When variables do affect policy, researchers very seldom say anything about how much impact they have. Variables that convey the most information to policymakers about what the public wants have a greater impact than other variables, but it is less clear how the measurement of policy affects our findings. Researchers pay much attention to hypothetical determinants of policy unlikely to matter very much, and little attention to those likely to be the most important. Implications for future research are considered.

Why Do Lobbying, Protest, and Other Forms of Advocacy Often Fail to Affect Policy? Some Possible Explanations

“…In which disciplines? Two previous analyses address publications in one discipline (Amenta et al 2010;Hojnacki et al 2012), and the others in two-sociology and political science (Burstein 2019(Burstein , 2020a(Burstein , 2020bBurstein and Linton 2002;Uba 2009), political science and economics (Baumgartner and Leech 1998), and political science and public policy (Bunea and Baumgartner 2014). This paper, too, focuses on sociology and political science.…”

“…at particular times affect such a broad outcome. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that advocacy will most likely matter when the independent and dependent variables pertain to a specific policy, and less likely when the independent variable is less targeted and the dependent variable is more complex (Burstein 2014;2020b).…”

“…There are nine analyses roughly comparable to this one, in that they analyze quantitatively an array of publications about advocacy and policy: three focus on interest groups and lobbying (Baumgartner and Leech 1998;Bunea and Baumgartner 2014;Hojnacki et al 2012), one on social movements (Amenta, et al 2010), two on interest groups and SMOs (Burstein and Linton 2002;Uba 2009), and three on advocacy broadly defined (Burstein 2019(Burstein , 2020a(Burstein , 2020b. Should the focus here be narrow-only interest groups or SMOs, for example--intermediate, including…”

“…And finally, this paper considers the impact of advocacy on policy at two levels-first, summarizing the findings from individual studies, and, second, considering how the overall pattern of findings may have been affected by decisions about research design. For example, if researchers use measures of advocacy especially unlikely to influence policy-and they there is evidence that they do (Burstein 2020b)-it may be their choice of measures that leads to their so often finding advocacy having no impact. This paper considers whether findings about the impact of advocacy on policy are affected by: (1) which issues and polities are studied; (2) how advocacy and policy are measured;…”

Editorial Introduction: Governance, Citizenry, and Methodological Advancement in Policy Research

“…The three articles representing our second theme of citizen policy perceptions and policy‐based effects include the analysis of the relationship between public opinion and public policy. Unlike previous research published in this journal (e.g., see Beyer & Hänni, 2018; Burstein, 2020), these articles move away from attempting to answer the age‐old question of whether public opinion influences policy, instead analyzing perception formation as well as individual experiences of policy outcomes. Maestas, Chattopadhyay, Leland, and Piatak (2020) examine the influence of risk perceptions on policy preference formation by drawing distinctions between preferences for uniformity and centralization in regulation.…”