Testing Policy Responsiveness with Dynamic MRP Estimates: Direct Democracy and Gay Rights in the U.S.

Abstract

One major challenge in testing whether direct democracy institutions increase governmental responsiveness is the measurement of state-level public opinion and public policy. However, recent developments in using multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) techniques to estimate state-level public opinion have allowed for more direct tests (Lax and Phillips 2009a, 2009b). Yet these studies find no evidence that direct democracy increases policy congruence with public preferences, even on typically salient issues like gay rights.In this paper we attempt to address the problem of dynamic public opinion by developing dynamic MRP estimates of attitudes toward homosexuality. We then test whether direct democracy institutions increase policy responsiveness to these attitudes using event history models of the adoption of several gay rights policies. The analyses focus on gay rights policies because this allows us to also examine the negative side of increased policy responsiveness – tyranny of the majority.