Public Opinion and Policy Liberalism in the American States

This paper examines the effect of public opinion on public policy in the American states. We use a new measure of state public opinion, liberal-conservative ideological identification of state electorates, derived from aggregating CBS News/New York Times national opinion surveys. Regression and LISREL are used in the analysis to demonstrate that state opinion is a major determinant of state policy. Citizen preferences are markedly more important than state social and economic characteristics in accounting for patterns of policy liberalism in the states. These results constitute a major challenge to economic development as an explanation of state policy. Unless mass views have some place in the shaping of policy, all the talk about democracy is nonsense. -V. 0. Key (1961, p. 7) Popular control of public policy is a central tenet of democratic theory. Indeed, we often gauge the quality of democratic government by the responsiveness of public policymakers to the preferences of the mass public as well as by formal opportunities for, and the practice of, mass participation in political life. The potential mechanisms of democratic popular control can be stated briefly. In elections, citizens have the opportunity to choose from leaders who offer differing futures for government action. Once elected, political leaders have incentives to be responsive to public preferences. Elected politicians who offer policies that prove unpopular or unpleasant in their consequences can be replaced at the next election by other politicians who offer something different. Of course, this picture describes only the democratic ideal. A cynic would describe the electoral process quite differently: Election campaigns