In a new paper (open access) in Party Politics, GovLis team member Jeroen Romeijn studies the policy positions of political parties in Germany. He finds that opposition parties generally take positions that are in line with public opinion. However, the positions of parties in government are not related to public opinion at all. Instead, they are related to the preferences of the supporters of government parties. Moreover, the paper shows that when the supporters of a political party and the general public disagree on a policy issue, political parties side with their supporters 84% of the time. Taken together, this suggests that when forced with a choice or put under pressure, political parties side with their supporters instead of the general public.

The new GovLis paper “the opinion-policy nexus in Europe and the role of politicial institutions” studies the relations between public opinion and policy on 20 policy issues in 31 European Democracies. In it, Anne Rasmussen, Stefanie Reher and Dimiter Toshkov find that there is a strong relationship between public opinion and policy, as well as a substantial degree of congruence between public opinion and policy. However, they find only limited effects of institutional factors, such as a country’s electoral system and the horizontal and vertical divisions of powers. The paper is forthcoming in the European Journal of Political Research and can be accessed here.

On June 7th and 8th the principal investigator of the GovLis project Anne Rasmussen attended a workshop about “Political Inequality and How Representative Democracy Functions” at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. She presented a paper, co-authored by GovLis team members Anne Binderkrantz and Heike Klüver and about how organized interests affect policy representation in Germany and Denmark.

The event was organized by Yvette Peters’ project “The Politics of Inequality“, in cooperation with Quinton Mayne from Harvard.

Early April 2018 GovLis team members Anne Rasmussen and Jeroen Romeijn presented three papers at the annual meeting of Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago. One key presentation was about the extent to which interest groups can strengthen the links between public opinion and policy.

Subsequently, the GovLis team met up at the Joint Sessions of the ECPR in Nicosia. Linda Flöthe and Wiebke Junk presented their work in a workshop on interest groups and public opinion, that was co-chaired by Anne Rasmussen in cooperation with Iskander de Bruycker. (Affiliated) GovLis team-members Stefanie Reher, Jeroen Romeijn and Dimiter Toshkov also presented their research in different workshops.

Project members Anne Rasmussen, Jeroen Romeijn and Dimiter Toshkov recently published a paper in Scandinavian Political Studies! The study focuses on 4 policy issues in Sweden and studies whether both the political agenda and policy react to both media advocacy and public opinion. It finds that although politicians seem to pay more attention to popular policy proposals, this does not necessarily translate into actual policy change. You can read more about the sub-project this study is a part of here.

This page contains all news updates from before 01-01-2018. October 30-31, 2017 The GovLis project organized the workshop ‘New Avenues in the Study of Policy Responsiveness’ with speakers from Europe and the US. October 26-27, 2017 Wiebke Marie Junk participated in the Annual Meeting of the Danish Political Science Association in Vejle. September 6-9, 2017 Wiebke Marie …