Public Opinion and Social Policy as a Feedback System: From Theory to Empirical Model Specification

Abstract

There are many arguments across disciplines that public opinion and social policy cause one another through feedback. For those attempting to empirically model opinion-policy linkages, this creates a potential endogeneity bias. The bulk of opinion-policy research does not empirically deal with this endogeneity. There are a few disparate strands across disciplines and topical foci that try to tackle the problem using lagged variable techniques. This article synthesizes theoretical opinion-policy literature and argues for an alternative possibility of simultaneous feedback between public opinion and social policy. This theoretical argument suggests that opinion and policy exert stable and perpetual forces on each other in advanced democracies that persist despite time and place specific shocks and trajectory changes. Given this theoretical argument the challenge of modeling simultaneous feedback effects statistically are discussed. Theory and model specification work in tandem as many theoretical assumptions must be met in order to rely on simultaneous feedback models.