This project addresses fundamental questions in the study of representative democracy: What impact, if any, does public opinion have on democratic governance? Do policymakers actually do what citizens want them to do? If public sentiment changes direction, will the actions of elected officials follow? A fundamental normative claim in favor of liberal democracy is that the recurrence of competitive elections promotes an ongoing connection between citizen preferences and government policy. In other words, electoral competition is designed to encourage governments to be responsive to the policy demands of the public throughout their time in office. Although scholars have shown enormous interest in this question, almost all their efforts thus far have been confined to examining responsiveness in the context of the United States Congress. This is unfortunate for a number of reasons. Most especially, the majority of established democracies in the world differ quite markedly from the United States in terms of their institutional structures and patterns of governance. Most democracies are parliamentary in design, which has the effect of giving policymaking power to the government (or cabinet), not the legislature. Further, most parliamentary democracies have more than two major parties. Policymaking typically requires the cooperation of several political parties, why may all simultaneously be attempting to appeal to very different groups of voters. At this point, comparative research is very limited in what it reveals about the connection between citizens and voters in these democracies.
In this CAREER award, the principal investigator creates an integrated program of research and education to explore the question of whether policymaking in multiparty parliamentary democracies is responsive to citizen preferences throughout the government's term in office. The investigator proposes a theory of policy responsiveness that focuses on the electoral and office-seeking incentives of politicians in a multiparty setting. The central claim is that these incentives encourage government parties to tailor policy to the wishes of narrow constituencies, whose policy views may or may not accord with those of the majority of voters. To test the argument, the investigator, along with a team of student researchers from both the United States and Europe, will collect original legislative data from seven European democracies on all changes on tax and welfare policy that have been proposed and enacted over the past ten to twenty years.
The project contains a strong educational component. It is expressly designed to help aspiring young scholars wishing to do comparative legislative research to overcome many of the practical difficulties associated with it. The investigator proposes three innovations in education and training. First, he proposes to take a number of students abroad, over the course of four summers, to perform archival legislative research. A novel feature of this activity is that these students will be working in collaboration with a team of students from universities in Europe who are also engaged in legislative research. The investigator also proposes to teach yearly practicum courses in legislative research to graduate and undergraduate students at Rice University in which they will be encouraged to use the data from the project, as it is being collected, in their own research. Finally, the investigator will host three annual week-long workshops that bring students at Rice University together with students from across the country and Europe who are working on questions in comparative legislative research.
