Public Opinion and the EU Railway Reform: Extending the Thermostatic Model

A normative feature of democracy is to fulfil citizens’ expectations.In the last 10 years, works on the relationship between public opinion and policy have been enhanced thanks to the introduction of the thermostatic model. Over time, public opinion is ‘thermostatic’ to policy changes: It asks for ‘more’ or ‘less’ policy as reaction to policy makers’ decision to provide policy under or over the desired output respectively. Specifically, by focusing on the level of public spending, the applied research has been so far analysing the opinion-policy congruence in two party and presidential systems. This paper aims to extent the application of this model by applying it to the EU 'regulatory state' and by capturing the exogenous change provoked by EU railway package reform on domestic policy. The first section reviews the main theories on public opinion and policy focusing on public responsiveness rather than policy representation. The second section takes into account the dynamics of multilevel governance and the policy processes. The third section analyses the Italian public opinion in the last decades in order to assess the extent of responsiveness to public opinion