To what extent are democratic governments responsive to citizens’ demands and preferences between elections? Are governments more likely to be responsive to the expression of public opinion through surveys or to collective and publicly voiced opinion in the form of protests? Are certain institutional and political configurations more likely to make governments more responsive to citizens’ views between elections? This paper proposes an analytical framework to guide the empirical analysis of governmental responsiveness to different (and sometimes contradictory) expressions of the preferences of the public. The paper first discusses the expectations about the effect of a number of factors on governmental responsiveness. With these theoretical expectations and assumptions in mind, the second part of the paper delineates a set of formal agent-based models of the dynamics of interaction between governments, different expressions of the public opinion and the institutional setting.
