Degrees of Democracy: Politics, Public Opinion, and Policy

Representative democracy works. That is the optimistic conclusion readers encounter in the impressive book Degrees of Democracy by Stuart Soroka and Christopher Wlezien. In what will surely be remembered as a pathbreaking exploration of the connection between public opinion and public policy across countries, years, and issues, the authors show that citizens routinely get what they want from government. Moreover, once members of the public get what they want, they scale back their preferences—as if operating a thermostat—to reflect the new status quo. Few topics are more important, and few authors analyze mountains of data in such a compelling way. All in all, Soroka and Wlezien deliver an upbeat view of government that one could easily miss amid doomsday chatter from political commentators. The book develops a thermostatic model of citizen-elite interactions in two main parts: public responsiveness and policy representation. The former refers to instances when citizens alter their policy preferences for more or less spending in reaction to government decisions. The latter concerns the extent to which leaders follow public opinion. This is the order in which they are presented in the book. Some readers working from a democratic theory mindset might expect the order of presentation to be the reverse—representation, then responsiveness—but that poses no major obstacles, as the authors consider the dance between both across decades. In many respects, starting points are arbitrary, as Soroka and Wlezien take great care in a succession of time-series models to explain each as a lagged function of the other. Furthermore, if citizens do not notice and react to what leaders do, then leaders have few incentives to follow public opinion.