A Comparative Analysis of the Opinion-policy Link in 43 Countries

• In Event: Congruence and Democratic Responsiveness

Abstract

The promise of representative democracy is that it can channel the wishes and desires of the populace through the political system, yielding policy that is in line with the people’s preferences. Recent research has however cast doubt on the credibility of this promise, showing that the opinion-policy link is weak, and skewed towards the preferences of richer citizens (Gilens & Page 2014, Bartels 2017); others instead maintain that representation generally works quite well (Soroka & Wlezien 2011; Rasmussen, Reher & Toshkov 2018).

In this paper, we present the results from the hitherto largest comparative analysis of the opinion-policy link. Combining survey data on a wide range of issues from over two million respondents with manually coded data on implemented policy in 43 countries over time, totalling over ten thousand country-year-issues, we are able to analyze to which extent political and institutional factors amplify or mute the voice of the people. The paper contributes descriptively by describing the state of representation in many countries that have not been studied previously, and theoretically, by examining the mechanisms that enable or impair representation.

Authors

• Mikael Persson, University of Gothenburg

• Anders Sundell, University of Gothenburg