Policy mood and thermostatic representation in developing democracies: taking the temperature in Uruguay

Abstract

ABSTRACT The dynamics of aggregate public opinion – particularly James Stimson’s measure of policy mood – have long been used to explain electoral outcomes and government responsiveness in the United States. However, we still know little about policy mood outside the US and a few Western European countries. Understanding the relationship between policy and preferences outside the pool of advanced democracies is crucial as voters outside that context are often depicted as outcome oriented; that is, they are depicted as voting based on valence issues, where there is shared agreement on the preferred outcome, instead of on a set of coherent policy preferences. We argue that this depiction of voters is attributable to the absence of data in these countries and not to the absence of coherent policy preferences. We test our argument by analyzing nearly three decades of Uruguayan public opinion data including 78 different questions administered 295 times. Our analysis shows that policy preferences across related issues in Uruguay largely move in tandem, suggesting that a coherent policy mood indeed exists. Further, we provide evidence that this policy mood is distinct from symbolic political ideology and that it responds thermostatically to changes in government. This thermostatic responsiveness suggests that Uruguayans do not merely focus on whether the economy is good or bad but, rather, update their policy preferences in response to the direction of government policy. Together, these results offer a much more nuanced depiction of public opinion outside advanced industrial democracies than previous research suggests, with important implications for democratic accountability in Latin America and other developing economies.