Does public opinion shape public policy? Effect of citizen dissent on legislative outcomes

Abstract

In South Korea, the Advance Notice Legislation (ANL) system requires by law that a public announcement be issued on any proposed bill that is likely to affect the fundamental rights, duties, and/or daily life of the general public. By investigating the effects of public dissent submitted via the online ANL system in South Korea, this study attempts to address the critical issue of how to increase citizen participation in the political process and to offer a possible strategy that modern democratic governments can employ in this regard. The findings suggest that citizens will actively participate in the political process to make their voices heard when an appropriate participatory mechanism is available, but they will be more active if the administration encourages citizen participation with various policies and institutions. In other words, formal and informal institutions actively interact to affect the behavior of actors both within and outside the political arena.

Keywords:

• Advance Notice Legislation (ANL)
• citizen dissent
• legislative process
• online participation
• public opinion
• public policy

Notes

1 Political dissent can also be expressed in an invisible form, but this is excluded from consideration in Table 1. For instance, voluntary absence from the polity itself can be a dissenting action (e.g., emigrants, internal separatists, and anarchists). In addition, some may remain in the polity but deliberately choose inaction or silence as a means of expressing dissent (e.g., non-voters or other non-participants in political duties).

2 Both ANL and online petitions in Korea function as online channels that help citizens to voice their opinions to the government, in particular the legislative and executive branches. Nonetheless, they differ in the way that public opinion is expressed. The online petitioning system allows an individual to post a petition for any issue of their choosing, but, once a petition is posted, other people can only express their support. To show their objection or leave other comments, they need to initiate a new petition themselves. In other words, public sentiment regarding an issue can be estimated using the number of people who have signed (i.e., who agree with) a particular petition. On the other hand, the ANL system is designed to gather citizens’ opinions regarding legislative bills under committee review rather than giving voice to all types of personal opinions. Citizens are allowed to freely post their opinions, whether they be positive, negative, neutral, or even irrelevant, and are required to understand the content of the bill in question. Unlike the online petitioning system, ANL requires participants to fill in a title and main text field, which requires more time and energy but the government, or the legislature, does not provide people with any direct feedback for the bill. For these reasons, ANL commenters are likely to have a stronger motivation to commit physical and mental resources to the discussion of a given bill or issue, even if (they feel that) their efforts are futile, which might be a reason why the ANL comments skew negative.

3 https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/separation_of_powers_0 (last accessed September 14, 2020)

4 On January 10, 2020, the National Assembly launched an online petitioning system, which allows people to submit a petition directly to legislative committees. Citizens are free to formulate a policy agenda and propose a legislative draft on the new petitioning system. On the ANL system they are limited to expressing their opinions on a bill proposed by either the government or individual legislators. The new system sets a threshold of 100 signatories for a petition to be disclosed in public, and 100,000 signatories to be officially reported to a committee. As of September 4, 2020, 10 petitions reached the 100,000-signature threshold (Kang 2020). Albeit promising, we were not able to collect sufficient data for the new system, given its newness.

5 https://www.gwanghwamoon1st.go.kr/ (last accessed July 5, 2020)

6 http://www1.president.go.kr/petitions (last accessed July 5, 2020)

7 https://petitions.assembly.go.kr/ (last accessed September 14, 2020)

8 https://www.epeople.go.kr/ (last accessed July 5, 2020)

9 It is “public” in the sense that it is carried out openly without attempts to escape arrest; it is “non-violent” in that it avoids bringing about or threatening physical harm to persons and damage to their property; it is “conscientious” in that it is motivated by sincere opposition to law or policy on grounds of moral, ethical or pragmatic considerations; and it is “political” in the sense that it aims to communicate this opposition in the hope of bringing about change in the laws or policies of local, national or international governmental organizations (Smith 2013, 3).

10 We tried various combinations of factors affecting the legislative outcomes, most of which were not presented in this article due to space limitations. In those attempts, we found a consistent pattern regarding the structure of government in relation with legislators. Whether a bill is sponsored by a legislator from the governing party did not have a significant effect on the likelihood of the bill passing but did affect the time taken for a bill to pass under the Moon administration. We conjectured that this is because the influence of the government party is fairly complicated, especially when it is confounded with the influence of the majority party in the legislature. In a broad sense, these results seem to support a large body of research that has found that the design of the political system has a significant influence on legislative outcomes.

11 The committee chair variable was statistically significant in the full models, but this was not consistent in the reduced models (data not presented). That said, we speculated that the committee chairs sponsoring a bill had a greater effect under the Moon administration because their role would be larger when the committee as a whole needed to consider the balance of multiple factors and differing opinions. The augmented communication efforts of the Moon administration may have influenced the importance of the committee to a greater extent.

12 This echoes the delegate vs. trustee debate and the corresponding two streams of traditional representative democracy research. The trustee model posits an elitist view in which elected officials are selected and entrusted with decision-making based on their superior ability, allowing them to make knowledgeable, self-regulating decisions on behalf of their constituents, even if these decisions go against the public’s beliefs and desires. In contrast, the delegate model posits that politicians merely embody the sovereign rights held by citizens, so there is little room for arbitrary decisions that are not supported by public opinion (For a more in-depth discussion of these schools of thought, see Stokes 2001; Fox and Shotts 2009).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Yonsei University Research Fund of 2022-22-0106.