The Opinion-Policy Nexus in Germany

This article analyzes the previously unresearched re-lationship between mass public opinion and public policy in con-temporary West Germany. By studying approximately 150 cases over the last decade, the nature of German democracy is revealed in relation to the overall consistency between majority prefer-ences and government action. The opinion-policy nexus is ex-plored in regard to the impact of issue saliency, landslide majori-ties, different categories of issues (e.g., redistributive, foreign policy), and the partisan composition of the government (i.e.. Social Democratic vs. Christian Democratic). In addition, there is a cross-national comparison of results for West Germany with the author's previous research on opinion and policy in the United States, Britain, and France. The findings indicate that (like other nations studied) public opinion and public policy in Germany are inconsistent in a majority of instances and that (un-like Britain or France) the partisan composition of the govern-ment does not matter vis-a-vis the degree of policy-opinion con-gruence. In the period following the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany, the concern of many analysts revolved around the viability and fragile nature of German liberal democracy. For example, Almond and Verba (1965) implied that West Germany lacked the attributes of an appropriate "civic culture " presumed necessary for stable democ-racy. Given the legacy of the Nazi era, Ralf Dahrendorf (1966) also raised the issue of German commitment to liberal democratic princi-ples. Recently, however, David Conradt et al. (1983:176) has observed that "the question is no longer whether West Germany will remain a liberal democracy, but rather, what kind of and how much democracy Germany will have " (cf. Smith, 1982; Katzenstein, 1987). The purpose of this article is to address Conradt's question by ap-plying an underutilized yet potentially enlightening perspective: the opinion-policy nexus. This approach entails empirically testing the