The Effect of Policy Traceability on Legislative Incentives

From Complexity to Clarity

The publication of Small Worlds in 1980 constituted a landmark in the study of Canadian politics. This contribution re-assesses the central findings of regional similarity and convergence in opinion preferences on public policy as observed in the original chapter by Richard Simeon and Donald Blake. Using public opinion data from the past 30 years, three central findings emerge: the presence of non-trivial levels of regional variation in public policy preferences; policy preference heterogeneity tends to be comparable to or greater than differences based on other socio-demographic features of Canadian society, and; regional preference heterogeneity since 1980 has increased and remains prominent even when separating out the effects of the Quebec issue. As a result, the contribution concludes that region is an important source of heterogeneity in Canadians' public policy preferences.

The Thatcher and Reagan revolutions initiated a decade of pro-market reforms in a large number of countries. The decade of liberalism was capped by the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe. In the countries where the Left remained in power, most notably in the form of social democracy, a similar shift was observed - reforms that abolished state ownership and government regulation and introduced market principles were introduced. In many countries new inequities grew as a consequence of shifts in policy. We have investigated if public opinion has reacted against the policy direction by putting a renewed emphasis on egalitarian goals and increasing the support for government intervention. Alternatively, a hypothesis of adaption sees mass opinion as adjusting to the shifts of the policy elites. The main finding based on analysis of data from the International Social Survey Programme is stability, but with a slight increase in a pro-equality direction. This change is most pervasive in the United States, making this country less exceptional in public policy preferences than what the conventional wisdom suggests. The cross-national patterns of equality beliefs show that the publics of the former communist nations of Eastern Europe remain quite egalitarian in attitudes, demonstrating, at least for Poland and Hungary, where appropriate data are available, that the egalitarian attitudes did not disappear with the political regime.

The debate and the outcome in the Obama Administration's drive to enact national health care reform illustrate the conditional nature of democratic governance in the United States, a blend of partisan policy maximization and elite mobilization strategies that exploit core public policy preferences. The public's core policy preferences have, for some time, favored expanding access to health insurance, regulating private insurers to ensure reliable coverage, and increasing certain taxes to pay for these programs. Yet the intensely divisive debate over reform generated several notable gaps between proposed policies and public opinion for two reasons.First, Democratic policymakers and their supporters pushed for certain specific means for pursuing these broad policy goals—namely, mandates on individuals to obtain health insurance coverage and the imposition of an excise tax on high-end health insurance plans—that the public opposed. Second, core public support for reform flipped into majority opposition in reaction to carefully crafted messages aimed at frightening Americans and especially by partisan polarization that cued Republican voters into opposition while they unnerved independents. The result suggests a critical change in American democracy, originating in transformations at the elite level and involving, specifically, increased incentives to attempt to move the public in the direction of policy goals favored by elites policies and to rally their partisan base, rather than to respond to public wishes.

To better understand the political economy constraints of education policy, we have conducted the annual ifo Education Survey in Germany since 2014. This paper summarizes selected key findings on the German publics' preferences for education policies ranging from early childhood education and schools to the apprenticeship system, universities, and lifelong learning. While the emerging picture is complex and multifaceted, some general patterns emerge. The majority of Germans is surprisingly open to education reform and favors clear performance orientation. Survey experiments indicate that information can have substantial effects on public policy preferences. Overall, education policies seem important for respondents' voting behavior.

The authors use primary archival records from Lyndon Johnson's presidency to rethink realist theory in international relations concerning leadership of public opinion in foreign policy. Much as the realists expect, Johnson pursued a strategy of opinion leadership that was intended to direct public opinion as he and his administration reacted to the country's international position. Using archival evidence and statistical analysis, the authors examine the relationship between public opinion information that was privately channeled to the White House and several measures of Johnson's behavior including presidential statements and military decisions about bombing and troop deployments. They find that Johnson was unresponsive to public opinion and also generally ineffective in directing public opinion. They conclude that realists' analysis of opinion leadership in representative democracies is inadequate and can lead to impractical prescriptions. What is needed is a theory of foreign policy making that incorporates the complexities of opinion leadership.

Educational inequality and public policy preferences: Evidence from representative survey experiments

Research on health and political behavior has identified a significant mental health-participation gap that is likely to have important consequences for political equality. Yet such consequences remain by and large unexplored. Inspired by 60 years of empirical research on public opinion, media and policy, this article proposes a roadmap for research on the political representation of mental health. It advances a number of research questions around 1) opinion formation and issue emergence and evolution, 2) multiple and complementary societal signals that can influence policy makers’ issue attention and policy change, and 3) different conceptions of representation and their consequences for public attitudes and political participation. The article also provides a preliminary attempt at addressing whether mental health spending incorporates signals from public preferences for spending on mental health services or policy problems. Making use of time-series data on spending on mental health services by local authorities in England between 1994 and 2013, the analysis finds no statistical association between spending and policy problems and reveals a negative relationship between spending and public preferences, suggesting that if spending is reacting at all to preferences, it misrepresents them. This article invites scholars to collect more data and produce more research that will guide interventions to help overcome stigma and participation challenges that undermine political equality as one of the key principles of democracy.

Research has demonstrated that white conservative Protestants are more opposed to abortion than their Catholic counterparts. At the same time, conservative Protestantism has made significant inroads among U.S. Latinos. This study augments existing research on religion and racial‐ethnic variations in abortion attitudes by comparing levels of support for legalized abortion among Catholic and conservative Protestant Latinos. Data are drawn from a nationally representative sample of U.S. Latinos. Significantly greater opposition to abortion is found among religiously devout conservative Protestant Latinos when compared with their Catholic counterparts. Latino Catholicism, which functions as a near‐monopolistic, highly institutionalized faith tradition among Hispanics, produces weaker antiabortion attitudes than those exhibited in Latino conservative Protestantism. Among Latinos, conservative Protestantism operates as a niche voluntaristic faith. These factors produce a religious schema that yields robust antiabortion attitudes. This study has important implications for understanding the intersection of race‐ethnicity, religion, and public policy preferences.

Despite the recent rapid development of policies to counteract physical inactivity (PI), only a small number of systematic analyses on the evolution of these policies exists. In this article we analyze how PI, as a public health issue, “translates” into a policy-making issue. First, we discuss why PI has become an increasingly important public health issue during the last two decades. We then follow Guy Peters and conceptualize PI as a “policy problem” that has the potential to be linked to policy instruments and policy impact. Analysis indicates that PI is a policy problem that i) is chronic in nature; ii) involves a high degree of political complexity; iii) can be disaggregated into smaller scales; iv) is addressed through interventions that can be difficult to “sell” to the public when their benefits are not highly divisible; v) cannot be solved by government spending alone; vi) must be addressed through a broad scope of activities; and vii) involves interdependencies among both multiple sectors and levels of government.We conclude that the new perspective on PI proposed in this article might be useful and important for i) describing and mapping policies to counteract PI in different contexts; ii) evaluating whether or not existing policy instruments are appropriate to the policy problem of PI, and iii) explaining the factors and processes that underlie policy development and implementation. More research is warranted in all these areas. In particular, we propose to focus on comparative analyses of how the problem of PI is defined and tackled in different contexts, and on the identification of truly effective policy instruments that are designed to “solve” the PI policy problem.

Values or Views of Government? Analyzing the Ideological Sources of Public Policy Preferences

Value landscapes and their impact on public water policy preferences

Divestment is a prominent strategy championed by activists to induce positive social change. For example, the current fossil fuel divestment movement includes over 1,500 institutions that control $40 trillion in assets. A primary pathway through which divestment is theorized to be effective is by influencing public beliefs and policy preferences, thus pressuring policymakers to take action. However, prior research only tests this argument via qualitative case studies. We assess the impact of exposure to information about fossil fuel divestment on public opinion through the use of national survey experiments in three major greenhouse gas emitters: the U.S., India, and South Africa. We find surprisingly little evidence that exposure to information about the fossil fuel divestment movement can increase public support for policies that address climate change. Our findings suggest that divestment movements may be less effective at changing beliefs and policy preferences than previously realized.

Elevated threat levels and decreased expectations: How democracy handles terrorist threats

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to explore ways to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of national human resource development (NHRD) policies led by South Korean central government agencies, identifying what policy decisions have been made and how they were implemented.Design/methodology/approachThe authors collected data from the 2016 NHRD policy budget plans of the ministries and used content analysis. The unit of analysis was the fourth level, a sub-task, in each ministry’s policy budget plan. All coded policy contents were analyzed in terms of the centralized NHRD model, as well as through the perspective of developmental task theory.FindingsThe study yielded the following policy and implementation problems. First, the current system of NHRD policies established and implemented by individual ministries risks hampering the validity and effectiveness of the policies. Second, the structure of NHRD policy execution may cause similarity and redundancy across policies, thereby hindering the efficiency of the policies. Third, it is problematic when NHRD policies focus on solving short-term problems to the exclusion of long-term ones.Originality/valueThis study provides public recommendations to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of NHRD policies created by South Korea’s Central Government. If such an analysis has been made internally by the government, it has not been made publicly available. It also offers practical insights that might help to improve state-led human resource development policies for other countries – especially developing countries – that are planning to introduce central government-led NHRD or to improve existing NHRD policies.