Dissertation

When public opinion changes, how closely do policies follow?  Central to democratic theory, the principal of popular sovereignty implies some degree of dynamic policy responsiveness: new policies should be enacted when mass opinion becomes supportive of that new policy.  While dynamic models of policy responsiveness have been tested at the national level, much less is known about the American states.  This is an important shortcoming, particularly in light of evidence that state public opinion is directly responsible for policy differences across the fifty states.   Moreover, because states differ in their institutional and political contexts, testing models of dynamic responsiveness at the state level provides many opportunities to specify the conditions when policy responsiveness is higher or lower.

I advance our knowledge about dynamic policy responsiveness at the sub-national level by measuring the longitudinal variation in state public opinion on different policy areas and linking these measures to various policy outputs at the state level in my dissertation.  Specifically, the dissertation is divided into two parts.  Part I concentrates on the measurement of state public opinion across a variety of domestic issues over time.  I show in Chapters 2 and 3 that multilevel regression coupled with imputation and post-stratification can be used to measure public opinion over time when augmented by a small (e.g., three year) moving average.  I use this approach to estimate yearly state public opinion on global attitudes (e.g., party identification and ideology in Chapter 2) as well as specific attitudes (e.g., the death penalty, abortion, education spending, welfare spending, and smoking bans in Chapter 3). 

Part II uses these dynamic measures to explore the dynamic properties of state public opinion (in Chapter 4) and test models of policy responsiveness at the sub-national level (in Chapter 5).  In regard to the former, I find that the dynamic pattern of public opinion varies across issues.  For instance, preferences towards the death penalty and welfare spending are dynamic with heterogeneous trends, preferences towards education spending are dynamic with homogeneous trends, and abortion attitudes are fairly stable.  I then test whether the thermostatic model of policy responsiveness provides a good description of policy shifts at the state level.  I find that, generally, the thermostatic model characterizes the dynamic relationship between public opinion and policy in the US states.  State attitudes towards education spending are positively related to per pupil spending in the short run; state attitudes towards welfare spending are positively related to AFDC benefits in the short and long run.  For both policy areas, policy changes exhibited the expected negative relationship on public opinion, but only in the long term.

These results provide additional evidence that the impact of public opinion on policy is causal.  To give just one example, I estimate that if support for education spending increases by three percentage points, spending per classroom increases by over $500 (assuming 25 students per classroom).  Consistent with the thermostatic model, I find that the causal relationship between public opinion and policy is a two-way street for education and welfare expenditures, but that the effects of policy on opinion are much smaller, occurring gradually over time.  While these effects are small, they do suggest that sustained changes in policy have meaningful impacts on public opinion over the long run.  

The broader impacts of the study are embodied in the original dataset that will be made publicly available, along with the details of the methodology used to generate and validate dynamic measures of state public opinion.  The methods of estimation can be extended to measure other preferences at the state level over time, as well as other attitudes such as tolerance, trust, efficacy or confidence which may also exhibit over time change across states.