Responsiveness and Political Efficacy in Advanced Democracies

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Panel co-organizers: Jennifer Oser, Ruth Dassonneville, Fernando Feitosa.

A core idea in democratic theory is that democratic governance should respond to the will of the people (Dahl 1961; Mill [1861] 1962). This panel investigates responsiveness with a focus on the question whether citizens perceive that political processes respond to their expressed political will (i.e., political efficacy). Contemporary concerns about democratic legitimacy in advanced democracies highlight the importance of scholarship on these topics. Responsiveness and political efficacy are complementary concepts, while the former implies that governments take into account the public’s preferences in policy-making, the latter refers to citizens’ perceptions of the extent to which their voices are indeed being heard. Despite the complementarity of these concepts, empirical research on these topics are rarely integrated in a broader theoretical discussion about democratic governance in advanced democracies and its challenges.

To advance this type of broader theoretical discussion about democratic governance, this panel integrates four papers that advance new research on synergetic conceptual and empirical investigations of political efficacy and democratic responsiveness. The first two papers address classic questions in the study of political efficacy, anchored by Campbell et al.’s classic definition of “the feeling that individual political action does have, or can have, an impact upon the political process” (1954, 187). The first paper by Oser, Feitosa and Dassonneville on “Citizens’ internal and external efficacy: a comparative investigation,” conducts a cross-national and longitudinal analysis of conceptual constructs, trends, and determinants of different types of efficacy. By analyzing these topics in the International Social Survey Programme’s data between 1985 and 2016, the paper provides new knowledge about fundamental empirical trends and the predictive power of individual-level and country-level determinants on internal and external political efficacy. The second paper by Bernardi and Gotlib builds upon this broad cross-national perspective to investigate political efficacy in relation to a key contemporary concern: “COVID-19, mental health, and political support.” By bridging lines of research on mental health and political support during a crisis period, this study analyzes new survey data of the British population to shed new light on how mental health mediates the relation between contextual stressors and people’s political attitudes.

The next two papers focus on democratic responsiveness, understood as the expectation that governing decisions should be informed by the views of the public (Esaiasson and Wlezien 2017). The panel’s third paper by Persson and Sundell on “The representation deficit” addresses a novel question of the causal mechanisms that may drive the unequal responsiveness that leads to a deficit of left-leaning policy. Drawing on public opinion and policy implementation data from over 30 countries, the paper identifies that this under-supply of leftist policy in relation to citizens’ preferences may be explained by political and fiscal implementation failures. The fourth paper by Wlezien and Soroka builds on this focus on substantive policy content to investigate “Heterogeneity and homogeneity in public responsiveness to media and policy.” The paper analyzes a variety of media coverage of public policies over a forty-year period and shows that accurate media coverage is an important mechanism for advancing the public’s responsiveness to policy change. Taken together, these complementary investigations of political efficacy and responsiveness outline new avenues for advancing scholarship on democratic governance across varied contexts and over time.


References
Campbell, Angus, George Gurin, and Warren E. Miller. 1954. The Voter Decides. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson.
Dahl, Robert Alan. 1961. Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Esaiasson, Peter, and Christopher Wlezien. 2017. Advances in the Study of Democratic Responsiveness: An Introduction. Comparative Political Studies 50 (6):699-710.
Mill, John Stuart. [1861] 1962. Considerations on Representative Government. Chicago: Henry Regnery.

Sub Unit

• Division 14: Comparative Politics of Advanced Industrial Democracies

Individual Presentations

• Citizens’ Internal and External Political Efficacy: A Comparative Investigation - Jennifer Oser, Ben-Gurion University; Fernando Feitosa, McGill University; Ruth Dassonneville, Universite de Montreal

• COVID-19, Mental Health, and Political Support - Luca Bernardi, University of Liverpool; Ian H Gotlib, Stanford University

• The Representation Deficit - Mikael Persson, University of Gothenburg; Anders Sundell, University of Gothenburg

• Heterogeneity and Homogeneity in Public Responsiveness to Media and Policy - Christopher Wlezien, University of Texas at Austin; Stuart N. Soroka, University of Michigan

Chair

• Fernando Feitosa McGill University

Discussants

• Noam Lupu Vanderbilt University

• Anne Rasmussen University of Copenhagen