The Comparative Macropolity: Public Opinion, Proportionality and Veto Gates

The idea of democracy assumes policy respond to some degree to public opinion – public opinion affects who is in government, and this affects policy. Responsiveness to public opinion is difficult to assess, however, as it is difficult to measure changes of public opinion over time. The Macropolity (Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson 2002) provided a way of measuring the long run evolution of public opinion in the United States, and other articles inspired by it (for example Bartle, Dellepiane-Avellaneda and Stimson 2010) have extended this to other countries. We have theoretical expectations of what we should observe, following McGann and Latner (2014). This depends on both the electoral system and the degree to which the legislative process is super-majoritarian. In countries with majoritarian election systems, we would expect that changes in public opinion affect government composition, and that this affects policy. However, complete alternation creates the possibility of overshooting – a change in government produces more change that the public wanted. In countries with simple PR parliamentary system we would expect rapid adjustment to changes in public opinion without the overshooting dynamic (McGann and Latner 2013). In countries with supermajoritarian decision making (many veto gates, such as the USA or Germany), we would expect slow adjustment. This paper test this hypothesis by measuring the changes in public opinion in the Netherlands over the last 40 years and comparing this to changes in government spending. It uses the item response theory (McGann 2014) to create a measure of policy mood that is comparable over time from the myriad of survey questions asked over the last 40 years. It will then compare the pattern in the Netherlands with that observed in countries with regular government alternations (UK, USA, France, Spain, possibly Germany).