The public, the protester, and the bill: do legislative agendas respond to public opinion signals?

ABSTRACT

Legislators adapt their policies and agendas to public priorities. Yet research on dynamic representation usually focuses on the influence of public opinion through surveys leaving out other public opinion signals. We incorporate mobilization of the public through protest. Combining insights from social movement studies and political science, we expect protest not to have a direct effect on attention change in legislative agendas. If anything protest should have an amplification effect on public priorities. Using a new and unique data set covering collective action, public opinion and legislative agendas across almost 40 years in four Western democracies, we confirm the effect of public opinion through surveys but find no support for a direct effect of protest. Protest rarely moves legislators: only in very specific issues will protest interact with public priorities and affect attention change in legislative agendas. Our results have important implications for policy representation.

KEYWORDS:

• Agenda-setting
• policy agendas
• protest
• public opinion
• representation

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/O4SHWQ, reference number UNF:6:CoIvm7dH7u0gJBZL2i/fXg==.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Luca Bernardi is Lecturer of Politics at the Department of Politics, University of Liverpool. His research interests are in comparative politics, political behavior and political psychology, with a focus on mass-elite linkages and mental health and political beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. His work appears in the Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science and European Journal of Political Research, amongst others.

Daniel Bischof is Ambizione Grant Holder at the University of Zurich. His research focuses mostly on comparative politics and political economy and is published in the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science and European Journal of Political Research, amongst others.

Ruud Wouters in Postdoctoral Researcher at M²P at the Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp. His research interests include media coverage of social movements, the impact of protest and protest participation and mobilization. His work appears in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology and Political Communication, amongst others.

Notes

1 Of course, law-making process is not always motivated by changes in public priorities. For instance, institutional friction matters (e.g., Bevan & Jennings, 2014; Jones, Larsen-Price, & Wilkerson, 2009). Further, while some research suggests that governing parties tend to also focus on the issues they own in their legislative agendas (e.g., Egan, 2013; Green & Jennings, 2019), government partisanship seems to matter less (e.g., Bevan & Jennings, 2014) compared to compulsory issues or pressing problems that demand legislative action (e.g., Adler & Wilkerson, 2012).

2 The data were originally collected by Laura Chaqués-Bonafont, Anna M. Palau and Luz M. Muñoz, with the collaboration of graduate students and the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Innovation and Science and the Agència de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (AGAUR). Neither these public institutions nor the original collectors of the data bear any responsibility for the analysis reported here. Public Laws. The Policy Agendas Project at the University of Texas at Austin, 2017. www.comparativeagendas.net. Accessed September 26, 2017.

3 We adapted MIP series compiled by the Politbarometer for Germany, the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) for Spain, Gallup and Ipsos-MORI for the UK and Gallup for the US. While we recoded the German and Spanish data ourselves, thankfully the CAP team made the UK and US data available online, under: http://www.comparativeagendas.net. Since data for the Gallup’s MIP question in the UK are not available after 2001, Ipsos-MORI’s MII data are also used; when overlapping, the two series are combined and averaged.

4 To be sure the findings presented below are not driven by one country, we re-estimated our analyses separately for each country. Our findings are robust to these modeling strategies (see Table A7 and Figure A1 in the Online Appendix).

5 A Wooldridge test for serial correlation in panel-data models is highly significant.

6 A Fisher-type unit roots test is highly significant and a Cameron & Trivedi’s decomposition of IM-test rejects the null hypothesis of homoskedasticity.

7 However, in the robustness checks Section 3A of the Online Appendix we discuss and test for alternative lag structures.

8 This interpretation holds when the error-correction term is negative and falls between 0 and −1, when equilibrium shocks are corrected at a gradual rate (Jennings & John, 2009, pp. 841–842).

9 Notice that we also estimated further combinations of interactions between the short and long run- ning effects of protest and public priorities without finding any significant conditioning effect by protest on public priorities. E.g. protest_t 1 × Δ public priorities_t: β=−0.40; P = 0.113. Δ protest_t × public priorities_t 1: β=−0.30; P = 0.008. Even though this latter effect is statistically significant on conventional levels, we do believe that this might be a finding due to chance: we did not theorize upon such an effect and the effect is not in the expected direction.

10 Note that in these analyses we no longer cluster on the issue level but use robust standard errors for countries.

Additional information

Funding

The research leading to these results received funding from the European Research Council through a Starting Grant (grant 284277) to the Responsive Gov Project (http://www.responsivegov.eu/), under the EU Seventh Framework Programme. The authors are grateful for this funding. The funder bears no responsibility for the analysis or interpretation of the data presented here.