Notes on Dalton chaps 11-12

The issue of the relationship between public preferences and public policy is a fascinating and (philosophically and empirically) important one, one that I focus on in another course, though from a US perspective.

What Dalton covers under collective correspondence (219-223) is a weak test of democratic performance because it focuses on overall value agreeemnt between citizens and the elite, not whether public policy conforms to public preferences.

More meaningful is the material on dyadic correspondence, where one compares constituency opinion to legislator voting. The results in the US case show considerable matching between district opinion and congressional voting, but, of equal interest, is the typical finding that the correspondence varies from issue area to issue area and that it is typically lower in foreign and defense policies than with respect to civil rights or social welfare policies. Why? Best bet, the effect of salience. The results in Europe, as Dalton notes (226), are not as good, if one looks at electoral district opinion and parliamentary vote. On the other hand, since parliamentary systems work on the basis of party discipline, a better way of looking at the relationship between citizen preferences and public policy in such systems is to look at the relationship between the position of parties and their supporters. And, indeed, there is a moderately strong relationship on both old politics issues (the welfare state) and the new politics issue of the environment (Figures 11.5, 11.6).

In gauging the correspondence between public opinion and public policy, a critical question is the level of detail. To find that supporters of a party are fairly negative about addional environmental protection and that the party is generally opposed to tighter environmental regulation is one thing, and yet another is the match between public preferences on a specific policy question and the decision of the government on that question. So, for a long time US and British citizens favored withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet the troops stayed. Moreover, even though troops were eventually removed from Iraq and are being removed from Afghanistan, in accord with public preferences, the time gap between the public's turn and the actual government response was considerable. Given all that, a safe estimate based on two studies of correspondence in the US is that the glass is about two-thirds full. Monroe and Page & Shapiro (both cited by Dalton) show, using different methods, a correspondence within a reasonable time between public opinion and public policy somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of the time, and Dalton (232) mentions studies of European systems where there is "general congruence," too.

In all of this, one should recall the big picture and the putative significance of constitutional arrangements.

On the other hand, even if there is congruence, one has to ask if public opinion is the driving force. An alternative argument is made, as Dalton (227) notes, that the causal process is opposite of what standard democratic theory normally imagines. In other words, political leaders mobilize citizens to adopt the issue positions they favor. So, for example, Margaret Thatcher campaigns as Tory leader to cut the size of government, mobilizes public opinion to this position and so leads her party to victory, after which she cuts, or restrains the growth, in government. In this situation, one might observe a close correspondence between public opiniion and public policy but only because the drinking voter was drawn to the water by the rider. If politicians are the driving force, but move publc opinion to approve the policies the politicians favor, is this not democratic? Is that not what leadership is all about? Or does democracy require that government does what the public on its own demands?

The decline in trust in government, and economic and social institutions generally, has been a preoccupation over the past thirty or forty years. but the picture from the Nuremberg Rally of 1938 should remind us that unwavering political support has its drawbacks, too. A citizenry which is willing to listen seriously to political leaders while retaining a level of healthy skepticism is probably what is desirable.

There is general pattern to the three levels (or domains) of support in Easton's framework (Dalton, 239) such that the greatest support is for the community (nation), and then for the regime (consitutional system), and then narrower support for the government (political authorities). Compare, at the extremes, Figure 12.3 with Table 12.2.

Though Dalton heads the section that reports on support for democracy as "support for a democratic regime," Easton's use of the term regime applies specifically to the constitutional system. So, while an Italian might support the general principle of democracy, he may think the Italian version of it--the Italian Constitution, the electoral system, the centralization of power in Rome, hyperbureaucratization, pervasive corruption, and so forth--is unsatisfactory. Asked about the constitutional system as whole, it may well be that a majority of Italians is negatively disposed..

Notice that confidence ratings in the large-scale, bureaucratic institutions of major companies and labor unions are also fairly low. Also, the press. All of this may well accord with postmaterialism.

It is somewhat surprising, given Dalton's emphases earlier in the book, that he doesn't do much to explore the relationship between cohorts, education, and values, on the one hand, and political support on the other. (Though he does show a pretty strongly positive relationship between postmaterialism and suport for democracy, and a slightly negative relationship between postmaterialism and confidence in government in Figure 12.4.) Following his logic, I would hypothesize that younger cohorts and postmaterialists would show lower levels of trust in government and other large-scale institutions. Education may well be curvilinearly related to trust in government and other institutions, with both the highly educated and those with limited education showing more cynicism but for different reasons.

While there may be high levels of aggregate support for the political community (as measured by pride in the nation, Figure 12.3), this may hide regionalist/separatist sentiments that are found in a number of Western European states (including the United Kingdom, especially among the Scots, Spain among the Basques for sure but also in other provinces, Italy, and Belgium).

Here's a puzzle. Dalton's Figure 12.2 shows a decline, though not as clearly in Britain, in the frequency with which people believe "politicians care what [they] think." This in a period when, following Dalton's argument about a new public increasingly composed of those who are cognitively mobilized, one would expect more people to feel politically efficacious. How could effiacy go up if fewer people think politicians care what they think? Or is this because, increasingly, citizens think they can affect the political system without working through politicians?