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 – generally in the form of protests? What happens when both forms of expression of the public mood are in clear contradiction? Are certain institutional and political configurations more likely to make governments more responsive to citizens’ views between elections? This paper proposes a theoretical and 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 theoretical expectations about the effect of a number of factors on governmental responsiveness: behavioural assumptions in relation to governmental actors, distribution of preferences of the public, form and following of collective action initiatives, type of issue and policy domain affected, and institutional configuration of the political system. 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. These models provide a range of likely outcomes that can be linked to the core theoretical hypotheses in relation to the aforementioned variables, with a view of assessing the usefulness of these models with empirical data in subsequent research.
