Responsiveness, Anticipation and the Study of Politicians’ Beliefs about Voters

• In Event: Fun Papers on Democratic Responsiveness

Abstract

How do politicians anticipate what citizens want? While political scientists have long focused on whether politicians can accurately estimate what citizens say in surveys, it is not clear why knowledge of public preferences should generate policy responsiveness. After systematically reviewing the literature, we argue for a dynamic and forward-looking framework focusing on how politicians draw causal inferences about voter reactions to public policy. We show the fruitfulness of our approach in the context of a major reform of cigarette taxation in Denmark where the then Social Democratic government reluctantly increased taxes on cigarettes. Using multiple data sources, we show that politicians were perfectly aware that most citizens wanted a major tax hike on cigarettes. Yet despite being aware of the overwhelming support toward the policy, politicians still anticipated an electoral backlash from increasing prices. Using open-ended responses from politicians and a method for visualizing causation in language with Directed Acyclic Graphs, we trace the causal anatomy of the backlash through the anticipated reactions of an intense minority (smokers) and a fear of how the political debate would shape citizens’ understanding of the policy. Our theoretical framework and findings help explain why politicians, even in the face of overwhelming public support for reform, can be wary of policy change and highlight why it is not citizens’ policy preferences per se, but citizens’ willingness to act on their preferences, that creates electoral incentives for politicians.

Authors

• Martin Bisgaard, Aarhus University

• Costin Marius Viorel Ciobanu, Aarhus University