Politicians and policy makers become tightly bound to the
unreflective whims of constituents mobilized by special interests…; decisions on highly technical matters of public policy are … made
by leaders glued to polling results.
There is a firmly embedded assumption in the popular folklore of
politics that politicians are highly attentive to public opinion. This folklore takes two contrary forms, one which evinces that political
leaders “pander” to the public by heeding their every whim, another which contends that political leaders use polls to help craft
their messages and present their programs in ways that are acceptable to the public. In both the government responsiveness and public
support scenarios, the resulting relationship between public opinion and public policy should be the same: a tight correlation between the
expressed wishes of the public as measured by polls and the decisions of public officials. Yet this presumed relationship stands in stark contrast
to the large number of specific cases in which public opinion and public policy are inconsistent. Recent examples of opinion-policy inconsistency
are available in both the United States (the impeachment of President Clinton, tobacco legislation, campaign finance reform, US involvement in
peacekeeping operations) and Canada (capital punishment, the Canada-US and then the North American Free Trade Agreements, the Goods and Services Tax,
compensation to hepatitis C victims, gun control, privatized health care, euthanasia and the Young Offenders Act).
This article attempts to resolve the apparent dilemma of presumed
attentiveness to public opinion and the frequent lack of a correlation between opinion and policy. We do so through an exhaustive search, summary
and quantitative analysis of survey results and policy outputs over the period 1994–2001. By using data on how individual survey respondents
voted at the last election, we are able to show that the low correlation is in large part the result of ideological divergences between
conservative public majorities supporting the right side of low-profile issues and more liberal government policies that are on the left side of
the same issues. We argue that due to their low profile nature, these divergences go largely unnoticed by the public. On the other hand, the
evidence suggests a much tighter correlation between opinion and policy on a small number of high-profile issues of which the public is much more
aware, thereby creating the appearance of attentiveness to public opinion.
Theoretical Expectations Regarding the
Correlation Between Opinion and Policy
Research on the relationship between public opinion and policy, particularly in the United States, often presumes that public opinion is
an autonomous and rational force responding in sensible ways to changes in the political and economic environment, that policy makers are responsive
to this autonomous force, and that it can be fairly accurately measured using polls (Geer, 1996; for a review see Shapiro and Jacobs, 1989). More critical perspectives
challenge the theory of government responsiveness by focusing on the frequent instances in which opinion and policy diverge. Some scholars have
even rejected the entire enterprise of searching for some kind of correlation between opinion and policy. They have suggested that mass
opinion as measured by polls is so unstable, so affected by measurement error such as question wording and order effects (Achen, 1975; Converse,
1964), or so easily influenced by changing context (Kuklinski and Quirk, 2000; Zaller
and Feldman, 1992) that to speak of “public opinion” at all may be a misnomer, and therefore to presume that public officials can
sensibly respond to or manipulate such a slippery entity is a mistake. However, in Canada, Europe and the United States, there is ample evidence
that despite these legitimate methodological and theoretical critiques, when individual opinions are aggregated and tracked over time,
collective opinion looks far more stable and reasonable than individual responses to survey questions, and demonstrates consistent
correlations with policy and changes in the environment (Bélanger and Petry, 2002; Feld and Groffman, 1988; Isernia et
al., 2002; Johnston, 1986; Page and Shapiro, 1992).
Another reason as to why policy might diverge with opinion as measured
by polls is that, although elected officials may try to respond to public opinion, they do not think that polls accurately represent the real state
of public opinion. They may therefore rely on other indicators or interpretations of public opinion that they find more useful than polls to
assess where majority opinion stands on an issue.1
For example, Entman and Herbst (2001) see public opinion as made up of four referents:
mass opinion refers to the aggregate of individual opinions found in polls; activated opinion includes the opinion of engaged,
organized and informed groups and individuals, including lobbies and experts; latent opinion is shaped by underlying beliefs behind
opinions and is where the collective stance ends up after debate; and perceived majorities are the perceptions of the mass audience,
journalists and political actors of where majority opinion stands on an issue.
There is always the possibility that these other
indicators or interpretations are at variance with poll results. In a similar vein, Noelle-Neumann (
1984) points out
that public opinion has the power to induce self-censorship among ‘deviant’ individuals. This so-called “spiral of silence” explains why publicly expressed opinion as measured by polls might be out of step with private views on issues or even actual voting intentions.
Another argument in support of non-responsiveness emphasizes the
autonomy of the state from public opinion, which allows politicians to ignore or deviate from mass preferences and get away with it. These deviations may reflect the greater influence of organized interests—party activists, interest groups, business
associations—on policy makers, a process characterized by Brooks as democratic frustration (Brooks, 1985).
The responsible party model is a variant of this view, in which government
decision makers formulate policy on the basis of their own, often strongly
held, policy preferences, and these may come into conflict with public
majorities that support the policies proposed by opposition parties,
thereby prompting non-responsiveness.2
As
Schedler (1998) points out, the responsible
party model also implies that policy makers should not shift previously
announced policy positions in response to changing public opinion for fear
of appearing untrustworthy and morally inconsistent, even at the cost of
non-responsiveness.
Non-responsiveness by government may depend
in part on institutional factors. The American context of weak parties,
frequent elections and representatives responsible to their electorates
rather than their party leadership may be particularly favourable to the
establishment of a close link with mass opinion. But one cannot presume
that the strong opinion-policy relationships identified in the US
literature will reproduce themselves in Canada. Strong party discipline
and a Westminster system of government may have contributed to insulating
cabinet decision making from Canadian public opinion.
The democratic frustration perspective presumes that opinion would
correlate with policy if only policy makers were responsive. This notion
can be challenged by arguing that correlations between opinion and policy
in no way provide evidence that policy makers are responsive. Correlations
could just as easily be interpreted as evidence of a counterfeit
consensus, whereby policy makers are able to lead members of the
public away from their true interests by endorsing elite programs. Under
such a scenario, where public opinion is the dependent rather than the
independent variable in the equation, any correlation between policy and
mass opinion is a hollow imitation of the theory of democratic
responsiveness (Margolis and Mauser, 1989). Seen
in this light, the absence of correlation between opinion and policy would
presumably imply that the public is capable of resisting government
efforts at manipulation.
At this point of the discussion, it should be clear that both the
government responsiveness and the counterfeit consensus perspectives are
caricatures of how opinion and policy are actually related. A more
balanced view holds that the relationship between opinion and policy is
reciprocal, with neither clearly leading the other.3
For example, Jacobs (1993) argues
that the growth of a public opinion apparatus within the executive branch
of the American and British governments originally intended to help
manipulate popular preferences through public relations campaigns has in
fact backfired and increased policy makers' interest in tracking and
responding to public opinion. He calls this the “recoil
effect.” Another example is Wlezien's work (1995; 1996) on the
‘thermostatic’ opinion-policy dynamics, where he finds that US
policy makers respond to public preferences and that the public
responds to changes in policy. See Soroka and Wlezien (2003) for evidence of a thermostatic opinion-policy
relationship in Canada.
Politicians do not conduct polls to
blindly follow, nor to grotesquely manipulate, but are doing both
simultaneously in ways that are not easy to categorize as either
“following” or “leading” public opinion. A similar
idea is at the root of constructivist studies of the opinion-policy nexus
(
Herbst, 1998;
Glasser and
Salmon, 1995;
Mendelsohn, 1998). Scholars
in the constructivist tradition suggest that “public opinion”
does not exist, except in the perceptions of decision makers, the media
and the public itself. The conversation between the media, elites and the
public constructs an understanding of the state of public opinion, which
becomes largely accepted as conventional wisdom. In such a scenario, one
would expect to find correlations between opinion and policy outputs, not
because decision makers are leading or following opinion, but simply
because perceptions and rhetoric about public opinion converge into a
coherent common narrative.
The broad theoretical perspectives outlined above provide us with the
beginnings of a road map, but much of the detail remains missing. Many
questions emerging from this theoretical review require the use of such
qualitative methods as archival research, interviewing elite informants,
and participant observation. There are, however, pressing questions which
can be appropriately addressed in a quantitative inquiry such as this one.
Under what circumstances are opinion and policy correlated? How has the
correlation evolved over time? Why has consistency declined in recent
years? To answer these questions, it is useful first to remember that poll
results only measure “mass opinion” and that they may not be a
good indicator of other attributes of public opinion. Second, it is also
useful to distinguish between various aspects of “mass
opinion”: its existence, its direction and its magnitude or
intensity (Schuman and Presser, 1981). Previous
work is often insufficiently subtle to recognize that the impact of mass
opinion on policy is likely to depend on the size of public majorities,
and on the conviction that it really exists and does not simply reflect
“non-attitudes.” Once we accept such a conceptualization, it
is not surprising that different kinds of “public opinion”
will impact differently on policy, depending on the circumstances. Geer
(1996) parsimoniously suggests that political
leaders will respond to mass opinion as measured by polls on high profile
issues, but will be free to respond to other definitions of public opinion
on lower profile issues.
Third, mass opinion is more likely to influence policy if public
majorities and government policies follow the same ideological direction
on issues than if one takes a left and the other a right direction. A
government of the left is expected to follow public opinion more closely
if public majorities support left policies than if they support right
policies. Ideological considerations are relevant here because the change
of government from Brian Mulroney to Jean Chrétien coincided with a
clear ideological shift to the left as far as federal policies were
concerned. There is no evidence, however, that a similar shift to the left
has occurred in Canadian public opinion since 1994. It is therefore
important to examine whether consistency has depended on the left-right
ideologies of successive governments.
Reviewing the Comparative Evidence
A number of different methodological choices are possible in order to
determine quantitatively the conditions which facilitate an opinion-policy
nexus. In the US, dyadic studies have examined the state of constituency
opinion and the voting behaviour of individual legislators in an attempt
to quantify the impact of mass opinion and other factors on
legislators' decisions (see for example Bartels,
1991; Wetstein, 1996; Burstein, 1998).
This type of study is well suited to an American congressional system, but
has little to offer in Westminster-style systems.
Another approach that is better suited to the Canadian case consists
of comparing actual government decisions (rather than individual
legislators' voting) with measures of public opinion on a large
number of issues. One group of studies within this approach looks for
opinion-policy congruence by tracking, over time, summary
measures of mass opinion and policy outputs. The seminal study within the
congruence tradition is that of Page and Shapiro (1983), who tracked policy preferences on 231 separate
issues between 1935 and 1979 and compared them to trends in policy
decisions over the same period, and concluded that there was congruence 66
per cent of the time, with opinion usually leading policy decisions.
Studies of congruence need not look at questions on an issue-by-issue
basis. For example, Stimson, MacKuen and Erickson (1995) constructed highly aggregated
liberal-conservative trends in the public mood and law making by Congress
and the Presidency since the 1950s, and found that as the public mood
shifts to a more liberal position, more liberal legislation is passed into
law.
A second group of studies looks for consistency rather than
congruence. These studies do not track opinion over time but instead
examine issues at a single point in time, dichotomizing public preferences
as supporting either the status quo or change, and examining subsequent
policy outputs to see if government decisions are consistent with mass
opinion. Evidence of consistency is established when the public supports
change and the government follows, or when the public supports the status
quo on a given issue and the government takes no action on that issue.
Monroe (1998) found a consistency rate of 55 per
cent in the US in the period 1980–1993, a drop of 8 points relative
to his earlier study over the 1960–1975 period (Monroe, 1979). Comparable rates have been found in
other countries. In a series of comparative studies on the US, Canada,
Great Britain, France and West Germany, however, Brooks (1985; 1987; 1990) finds consistency rates that are approximately
20 percentage points lower than other authors.4
Petry (1999) reports a consistency
rate of 60 per cent in Canada over the period 1968–1993.
Brettschneider (1996) finds that government
actions in postwar Germany are consistent with majority opinion 71 per
cent of the time. He also finds that changes in public opinion and
government decisions are congruent 65 per cent of the time. The lower
consistency rates found by Brooks are explained, in large part, by
differences in methodology and time periods.
One alleged advantage the congruence approach has over the consistency
approach is that it can tell us whether shifts in mass opinion occur prior
to changes in government policy or not. Examining the temporal order of
change in opinion and government decisions may, therefore, offer some clue
about the direction of causality in the opinion-policy relationship
(something the consistency approach alone cannot do). However, the
congruence approach has several drawbacks that lead us to adopt instead
the consistency approach in this research. Since it must rely on repeated
identical survey questions only, the congruence approach automatically
excludes issues for which repeated polls are not available. This is a
problem because repeated polls normally represent only a small subset of
all available polls. Another problem with the congruence approach is that,
if there is no change in the distribution of opinion over time, it is not
possible to determine congruence. When we take sampling error into
account, many instances of opinion changes are too small to be
statistically significant. These instances must be eliminated from the
analysis. Consequently, the sample of usable repeated surveys is likely to
be too small to permit us to draw meaningful statistical inference from
change in public opinion. To illustrate the difficulties and limits of the
congruence approach, consider that, out of a total of more than 800
surveys, there were only 55 usable repeated surveys in this study. And out
of those we found only nine unambiguous cases of opinion leadership
(either by the masses or by government).5
There were five cases of mass opinion leadership involving the
following: deficit reduction; lower government spending on foreign aid;
forbidding doctors from charging user fees; banning adds for cigarettes;
and legislation to protect gays and lesbians. Four cases of leadership by
the government involved regulating the sale of firearms, TV program
censorship, healthcare spending and cutting the number of public
employees. Another illustration of the limits of the congruence approach
is Brettschneider's study of the opinion-policy relationship in
Germany. He starts with a sample of 331 usable polls (from a population of
more than 1000 public opinion surveys). He finds 94 instances of measured
opinion change in the sample (remember this is over the period
1949–1990—forty years). Out of these 94 instances of opinion
change, he finds 14 cases of “mass opinion leadership” when
opinion changed first and congruent government activities followed. In
most of the remaining 77 instances, he finds that it is impossible to
determine the direction of the relationship. So, in the end, out of a
population of more than 1000 polls, he is able to infer leadership of mass
opinion over policy in only 14 cases.
In the remaining 46 cases,
the congruence approach was too blunt to precisely determine the causal
direction of the opinion-policy relationship.
Whether opinion influences policy or policy influences opinion is
doubtless an important issue. However, we do not think that the
quantitative method we use in this essay is appropriate to the task. Page
and Shapiro (1992, 26–27) themselves have
acknowledged the futility of trying to measure the temporal congruence
between changes in opinion and policy even in the ideal situation where
there is a large number of usable cases. In this article, we assume that
opinion precedes policy without attempting to establish a causal direction
by way of the congruence approach or any other method.6
As a consequence, consistency is interpreted as government
responding to public opinion rather than public opinion supporting
government. Whether consistency is interpreted one way or the other has
some minor influence on methodological choices (the selection of cases and
independent variables, for example). However, formulating consistency in
terms of opinion support rather than government responsiveness does not
fundamentally alter our overall conclusions.
This task will be
left for a later study, with a
different—qualitative—methodology.
The Study
Cases were selected for analysis as follows. Available published
national survey data from November 1993 through 2000 were inspected for
items matching federal policy actions. The data were found in the online
survey archives of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Queen's
University, the social science data collection at Carleton University and
the University of British Columbia numeric data services. The survey items
came from five reputable polling institutions: Gallup, Angus Reid,
Environics/CROP, Decima and Pollara. Only those polls dealing with
public preference on an identifiable question of national policy were used
in the analysis. This raises the question of what exactly constitutes
national policy questions as opposed to provincial or local issues. A
number of survey items deal with functions carried out primarily at the
provincial level, including education, health and social welfare. But the
reality of Canadian federalism is that it is very often the case that
federal legislation, regulations or court decisions can make policy
changes implied in the questions about these provincial functions. The
reason why national survey questions about provincial functions are asked
is precisely because the issue has policy ramifications at the federal
level. Consequently, provincial issues were included in the analysis to
reflect the realities of Canadian federalism, but only federal policy
decisions were considered in the outcome.
Well over 800 polls were found, most of which did not meet the
pre-established criterion. A small number of polls asking respondents to
explicitly approve or disapprove of recently adopted governmental
decisions were excluded because they contradict the posited temporal
sequence between opinion and policy. Polls appearing repeatedly in
identical form were considered as separate cases unless they appeared
within the same calendar year, in which case they were averaged and
treated as one poll. This was to avoid the possibility of coding public
opinion as both consistent and inconsistent for the same issue. Sampling
error was also taken into account. Since the samples used in the surveys
have a three per cent margin of error, all polls indicating a difference
between majority and minority opinion falling within the six per cent
range were excluded from the analysis. Only those polls that gave
respondents a dichotomous choice of agreeing or disagreeing with a
specific policy statement were kept in the analysis. Polls that gave
respondents more than two preference alternatives (e.g., increase,
maintain or decrease the level of program spending) were therefore
eliminated because they cannot be operationalized within this dichotomous
framework. After elimination, 230 cases remained, substantially more than
those reported during the governments of Brian Mulroney (162) and Pierre
E. Trudeau (186) in Petry (1999).
The next step was to record government policies in a similar
dichotomous fashion on the same issues. The record of federal actions on
each case was inspected from November 1993 through November 2001 using the
following archival sources: Canadian News Facts; The Canadian
Annual Review of Politics and Public Affairs; Facts on File;
The Official Report of the House of Commons Debates; the annual
reports of federal ministries and agencies; and various volumes of How
Ottawa Spends?. The objective was to classify policy outcomes as
having resulted in the policy change implied by the survey or as
maintaining the status quo within a twelve-month period following the date
of the survey. This was not as problematic as one might suppose because
survey items typically deal with specific policy proposals that are under
consideration at the time. For government spending cases, the amount of
money allocated had to shift by at least five per cent from the previous
year (after adjusting for government inflation) in the direction implied
by the survey question to qualify as a policy change. Otherwise, it was
reported as maintaining the status quo. Issues that did not permit a
clear-cut classification were submitted to the judgement of policy
experts. A few instances where it was not possible to satisfactorily
determine the policy outcome were excluded from the analysis.
Findings
Table 1 presents a first look at the
findings by comparing the state of mass opinion, dichotomized into
majorities for change and majorities for the status quo, and actual policy
outcomes in the subsequent twelve-month period. We report results for the
Chrétien, Mulroney and Trudeau eras separately.7
The data analyzed here are accessible on the Web site of the
Centre for the Analysis of Public Policy at Université Laval,
available at www.capp.ulaval.ca.
The Chrétien period
exhibits a consistency rate of 49 per cent, significantly lower than the
69 per cent rate during the Mulroney period and a little lower than the 52
per cent during the Trudeau period. Measures of association (gammas)
between majority sentiment and policy outcomes vary from .35 under
Trudeau, .79 under Mulroney, to a bare .19 under Chrétien.
Table 1: Consistency and Majority Preference for Policy Change
(1968–2001)
Several empirical points should be underlined. First, consistency
under Chrétien looks unusually low only when compared with
consistency during the Mulroney era, but is in line with consistency
during the Trudeau era.8
Variation in
consistency across governments is not due to methodological differences.
We used identical methods for data collection and analysis during all
three periods. Cases (surveys and decisions) associated with the Clark
(1979), Turner (1984) and Campbell (1993) interludes were deleted from the
analysis.
Viewed in this light, the low consistency achieved by
the government of Jean Chrétien appears less puzzling than the
unusually high consistency achieved by the government of Brian Mulroney.
Second, there were quite dramatic fluctuations in responsiveness between
1968 and 2001, apparently linked to partisan turnover (the Liberals being
less responsive than the Conservatives). The variation in consistency over
time is not unique to Canada, with significant variations over time in the
US (
Monroe, 1998: 13–14) and very large
variations in Germany (
Brettschneider, 1996:
300). The question here is: What explanatory factors account for the
decrease in consistency between the Mulroney and Chrétien
governments?
It is possible that the change in the level of consistency between the
Mulroney and the Chrétien periods is simply an artifact of change
over time in the distribution of issues. There may have been, for
instance, a larger proportion of low consistency issues raised by surveys
during the government of Jean Chrétien as compared to the
government of Brian Mulroney. The relative number of surveys on high
consistency issues may also have dropped since 1993. To examine this
possibility, Table 2 presents the level of
opinion-policy consistency under Chrétien and Mulroney, broken down
by issues. From the table, we see two low consistency issues that are new
to the Chrétien government (privatized health care; young
offenders). Other low consistency issues, while not entirely new, have
taken on more importance in recent opinion polls (mercy killing; tough on
crime; workfare). Furthermore, some high consistency issues (economic
regulation; Quebec/Canadian unity) have received less attention in
recent polls. On the other hand, we also see high consistency issues that
were raised more often in recent surveys than during the previous
government (government cuts; deficit reduction; sexual orientation
issues). Consistency during the Chrétien years is lower in roughly
similar proportions across pretty much the whole issue spectrum. The only
exception is the crime issues complex, where the level of consistency
under Chrétien (17%) is half the level of consistency under
Mulroney (33%). On balance, pending a more accurate assessment by way of
multivariate regression analyses, there is no clear evidence from Table 2 that the distribution of issues under
Chrétien is skewed toward low opinion-policy consistency when
compared with the distribution of issues under Mulroney.
Table 2: Consistency Broken Down by Issues 1984–1993 and
1994–2001
Aside from methodological considerations, there are substantive
reasons as to why consistency may have declined after 1993. One
explanation of lower consistency under Chrétien is that there was
an increase in government bias against policy change in recent years.
Previous research has uncovered what appears to be a general government
bias against change and in favour of the status quo in policy making
(Brettschneider, 1996: 301; Monroe, 1998: 18). Given this general bias, government
will appear more responsive—and consistency will be more
likely—when public opinion favours the status quo as compared to
when public opinion supports a policy change. Based on this, we
hypothesize that inconsistency will occur more frequently when the public
supports change and the government opts for the status quo than when the
public prefers the status quo and the government favours change. Table 1 indeed shows that inconsistency is far more
frequent overall when the public supports change but none is forthcoming
from the government (95 + 32 + 80 = 207 cases overall), than when the
public supports the status quo and government initiates change (22 + 18 +
10 = 50 cases overall), suggesting that there are institutional forces
which lead to government inertia and resistance to change, even when the
public is supportive. There is, in other words, a bias against change and
in favour of the status quo in policy making, which is consistent with
German and American findings.9
The number of
cases in which opinion supports change while government supports the
status quo is typically higher in Canada than in the US. There is a
methodological reason, involving repeated polls, for the discrepancy. We
consider repeated polls as separate cases and compare policy outcomes with
majority opinion on each case, while Monroe treats repeated polls as one
poll and reports only the earliest survey in the series. Our method
reduces consistency relative to Monroe's method because repeated
polls have a tendency of targeting issues in which the public supports
change and government favours the status quo (this is presumably why
pollsters keep repeating polls). However, the methodological bias against
consistency resulting from counting repeated polls as separate cases is
not as severe as one might expect. When repeated polls are counted as one
case, consistency rises to 55 per cent under Trudeau, 70 per cent under
Mulroney and 53 per cent under Chrétien. Thus, the increase in
consistency is very modest. More importantly, the relative magnitude of
the variation in consistency across governments remains basically the same
irrespective of the method used.
This bias can be quantified by
taking the percentage of times that a public majority who favoured the
status quo received a status quo result, and subtracting from it the
percentage of times in which the public favoured policy change and
actually experienced a policy change outcome. From
Table 1 we see that there is a bias against change in
policy making under Trudeau, Mulroney and Chrétien, but the bias is
substantially smaller under Mulroney (71 − 68 = 3) than under
Trudeau (69 − 48 = 21) and especially Chrétien (68 − 41
= 27). Indeed, the bias under Mulroney is almost 0. So, even though there
is a general government bias against change in policy making, its
intensity has varied quite dramatically across governments, and this
variation in bias could explain part of the variation in consistency.
10 Public majorities supported change more often
during both the Trudeau era (83 per cent favouring change) and the
Chrétien era (70 per cent) than in the Mulroney era (62 per
cent).
Why was there greater inertia and resistance to change during the
government of Jean Chrétien than during the government of Brian
Mulroney? One reason may be that they had markedly different leadership
styles. Brian Mulroney was prime minister at a time of profound
socio-economic transformations, and took a number of important initiatives
that reversed the policies pursued by his predecessor Pierre E. Trudeau
and radically transformed the political landscape (the Free Trade
Agreement, GST, closer ties with the US). By contrast Jean Chrétien
deliberately avoided fundamental changes after a balanced budget had been
achieved. His stay in office in the post-deficit period was characterized
by prudent management.11
For contrasting
accounts of Brian Mulroney's and Jean Chrétien's
leaderships, see Nossal (2003) and Savoie (2003). However, it should be noted that the passage of
important measures in the environmental and social policy fields in the
final year of Jean Chrétien's mandate (not recorded in this
study) represented a reversal of his earlier record.
The
difficulty in making policy changes during the Chrétien government
was compounded by the fact that the elections of 1997 and 2000 were called
early, thereby forcing important laws to die in the order paper when
Parliament was dissolved. Another factor was the use of the Charter of
Rights and Freedoms by an increasingly activist Supreme Court to undercut
or nullify legislation that was sometimes supported by a majority of
Canadians (
Hiebert, 1999). Greater government
inertia may explain in part why the Chrétien government had a
larger bias against policy change (and was ultimately less responsive)
than the Mulroney government. However, it is difficult to argue that the
large bias against policy change (and the low consistency) during the
Trudeau government was also due to inertia and resistance to change.
Government resistance to change, however real in recent years, cannot
explain alone all the variation in consistency across successive Canadian
governments.
A more valid explanation of the recent decline in opinion-policy
consistency finds its origin in the ideological divergence between public
majorities and government policies. There is evidence from case studies
that the Canadian public has been for some time now more conservative than
policy makers on a variety of issues such as wiretapping (Fletcher, 1989), election rules (Blais and Gidengil, 1991), gun control (Mauser and Margolis, 1992) and unreasonable search and
seizure (Fletcher and Howe, 2000), and there is
no reason to believe that this trend has reversed in recent years. In
fact, experts argue that Canadian values have undergone a shift to the
right during the 1990s (Nevitte et al., 2000;
see also Soroka and Wlezien, 2003). At the same
time, it is a truism that many federal policies shifted to the left under
Jean Chrétien relative to Brian Mulroney. So the gap between the
ideologies of the Canadian public and the federal government, which was
small under Mulroney, has increased under Chrétien. This suggests
that inconsistency has increased in recent years as a result of a
combination of the public supporting the right position on many issues and
the government of Jean Chrétien opting for the left position on the
same issues.
To test whether or not ideological divergences between the Canadian
public and the federal government could be the source of the observed
increase in inconsistency, we assigned a right or left position to public
majorities based on how individual survey respondents voted at the last
election.12
Many Canadians have difficulties
recognizing ‘left’ from ‘right.’ However,
electoral studies have shown that Canadian citizens organize their
political values along clearly identifiable left-right dimensions,
regardless of whether they recognize the dichotomy.
We were able
to obtain the data on how individual respondents voted in 123 surveys out
of our sample of 230. We ran a series of logistic regressions in which the
dependent variable is the change vs. status quo direction of individual
opinion, and the independent variables are dummies for individual party
support at the last election. Cases in which majority opinion is
positively and significantly associated with a vote for the Progressive
Conservative party and/or the Reform party, and negatively associated
with a vote for the New Democratic party, are reported as public
majorities in support of the right. When the change vs. status quo
direction of public majorities is positively associated with a vote for
the New Democratic party, and negatively associated with a vote for the
Progressive Conservative party and/or the Reform party, we recorded
them as public majorities in support of the left.
13 Scores for Liberal party and Bloc Québécois
votes were ignored in the calculation. See below for further analyses
incorporating a variable for Liberal party voting. We did not include
other attributes (socio-economic status, occupation, sex, religion) of
individual survey respondents because there were no relevant theoretical
links to our research problem.
After the elimination of 21 cases
in which the difference between the left and right direction of public
opinion was not statistically significant, we were able to record 102
cases of “bipolar” public majorities, where a valid measure of
the ideological direction of mass opinion could be identified in addition
to the change vs. status quo dichotomization.
Table 3 cross-tabulates the direction of
mass opinion, dichotomized into right and left public majorities, and
records the subsequent consistent or inconsistent government actions. We
report results only for the Chrétien era because the data about how
survey respondents voted in the last election were too scarce for the
Mulroney and Trudeau eras to generate reliable statistical results. The
data show that inconsistency is far more frequent overall when public
majorities take a right position on issues and the government adopts a
left position on the same issues (36 cases overall), than when the public
supports a left position and government prefers a right position (15 cases
overall). It therefore appears that, aside from its reluctance to initiate
policy changes desired by the public, the government of Jean
Chrétien took a more leftist position than the Canadian public on
many issues.
Table 3: Consistency and Majority Preference for the Right Side of
Issues 1993–2001
Is there a relationship between government biases against change and
against the right? The answer is found in Table
4, which cross-tabulates the ideological direction of public
majorities, dichotomized into right or left positions, and the change vs.
status quo dichotomy. The data indicate that there is a strong association
between public majorities for change and support for right-wing positions
on issues. Rightist public majorities are approximately three times more
likely to support change (41 cases) than the status quo (14 cases). The
evidence suggests that public majorities in support of policy change are
much less likely to get what they want from the government, especially if
the policy changes public majorities support have a more right-wing
flavour than what the government is ready to deliver.
Table 4: Majority Preference for Change and for the Right Side of
Issues 1993–2000
A more accurate understanding of consistency during the government of
Jean Chrétien can be obtained by using a multivariate analysis.
Table 5 presents six multivariate logistic
regression models of consistency. The dependent variable takes the value 1
when policy is consistent with opinion and 0 otherwise. There are four
control variables in the models. It is expected that a large majority
regarding an issue will carry more weight than a bare majority.
Consequently opinion-policy consistency should correlate positively with
the extent of majority opinion. The variable is expressed as the
difference between majority and minority opinion percentages on each poll.
We also record the number of undecided respondents in the poll, a measure,
albeit an imperfect one, of how salient the issue is to the public and
therefore how “real” their expressed opinions are. Issue
saliency is measured by the inverse proportion of respondents answering
“don't know” or “no opinion” to survey
questions. The higher the value of the indicator, the higher the saliency.
Governments should feel more pressure to respond to issues that are
salient to the public. Consequently, we hypothesize that consistency
correlates positively with the measure. The models also include a dummy
variable for seven newly introduced issues during the government of Jean
Chrétien. Issues reported twice as often or more under
Chrétien as compared to Mulroney are coded 1. They are: government
cuts, deficit reduction, privatized health care, gun control, sexual
orientation, mercy killing and young offenders (see Table 2). Other issues are coded 0. We hypothesize
that the coefficient for new issues is negative.
Table 5: Multivariate Logistic Analyses of Consistency
We also look at the electoral cycle. It is generally expected that a
party will try to pass key policies at the beginning of its term in
office, in the year following an election, especially those policies on
which it has been elected and that are supported by public majorities.
Once it has passed its key policies, the governing party will be faced
with issues that enjoy less popular support. New issues can also arise at
that time that are not necessarily popular. We should, therefore, expect
higher levels of consistency in the year immediately following an
election. On the other hand, politicians have an incentive to respond to
public opinion because they will be held accountable for their actions at
election time. As election time approaches, the government might face
greater pressure to respond to public preference. Consequently, we should
expect that consistency will increase again as elections draw nearer. Here
we hypothesize a curvilinear relationship between consistency and
elections, and we operationalize the electoral cycle variable as a dummy
taking the value 1 if a survey is administered in the years immediately
before and immediately after an election, and 0 otherwise.14
We wish to thank the anonymous referee who
pointed out the correct way to operationalize the electoral cycle
variable.
Models 1 and 2 measure the effect of the variable for change on
consistency during the period 1968–2001. The variable is a dummy
coded 1 when majority opinion prefers change and 0 when the majority
prefers the status quo. We hypothesize that change correlates negatively
with consistency. We know from the previous discussion that the Mulroney
government was less biased against policy change than the Trudeau and
Chrétien governments, and consistency was substantially higher
during the Mulroney years as a consequence. We therefore hypothesize a
significantly positive coefficient for the Mulroney variable in the
additive model (1) and for the change × Mulroney term in the
interaction model (2).
From the additive model (1), we see that the estimate for the change
variable is significant and in the correct direction. All other things
being equal the predicted odds ratio of consistency when majority opinion
supports change is e−0.75 = 0.46, less than half the odds
of consistency when majority opinion supports the status quo. The
coefficient for the Mulroney government variable is significantly
positive, as predicted. The odds of consistency under Mulroney are twice
the odds of consistency under Trudeau. The coefficient for the change
× Mulroney variable in the interaction model (2) is positive and
significant. This must be compared with the significantly negative
coefficient for the change variable (−1.08) which represents the
effect of change on consistency during the Trudeau years. Despite its
overall negative effect on consistency, change is significantly more
likely to be associated with consistency under Mulroney than under
Trudeau. The coefficient for change in interaction with Chrétien is
negative but not statistically significant, suggesting that there is not
much difference in the effect of change on consistency between the
Chrétien and Trudeau eras.
The coefficient for the extent of majority opinion is of correct sign
and statistically significant, indicating that a greater consensus in mass
opinion in favour of a particular direction produces more responsiveness
from the government. This result is directly relevant to the issue of the
use of polls by government decision makers. One side of the issue argues
that decision makers trust polls as an accurate reflection of public
opinion and often use them to gauge the direction of public opinion. The
other side argues that decision makers don't trust polls and that
they will often construct a view of public opinion more consistent with
their own preferences and those of people around them, rather than
consulting the actual state of mass opinion. What our finding shows is
that such willful blindness is less possible when the majority in favour
of a particular direction is very large. The estimates for issue salience
are not significant, though we interpret this as evidence of the weakness
of our measure.15
A high proportion of
“don't know” responses may be a sign of low salience, but
it may also be a sign of indecision on salient and contentious
issues.
The coefficient for new issues is the correct (negative)
sign but it is not statistically significant, suggesting that the new
issues that were surveyed after 1993 are not skewed toward inconsistency.
The electoral cycle variable is of the correct sign but it is not
significantly different from 0, suggesting that responsiveness is
unrelated to the timing of public opinion surveys in relation to
elections.
The next four models only consider the determinants of consistency
during the Chrétien years. Models 3 and 4 measure the impact of the
conservative public ideology on consistency in addition to, and in
interaction with, the change vs. status quo direction of mass opinion.
From the additive equation of model 3, we see that public majorities that
support the right have a negative and significant impact on consistency.
All other things being equal the predicted odds ratio of consistency when
majority opinion supports the right side of an issue is
e−0.64 = 0.42, indicating that public support for the
right reduces the odds of consistency by more than half. The significantly
negative coefficient for the change × ideology variable in model 4
suggests that there is a strong interaction between the two variables.
Public majorities for change and public majorities in support of the right
powerfully combine their effects to lower opinion-policy consistency.
Models 5 and 6 examine whether consistency during the Chrétien
government is higher when public majorities are positively associated with
a vote for the Liberal party. The variable for Liberal support is coded 1
whenever public majorities (whether in favour of change or the status quo)
are positively and significantly associated with a Liberal vote in the
last election, and 0 when public majorities are negatively associated with
Liberal support. Cases in which the association is not statistically
significant are eliminated from the sample. Note that a public majority in
support of or against the Liberal party can also be a bipolar public
majority. We could identify 99 cases (out of 123 cases that report the
respondents' votes in the last election) in which public majorities
were significantly associated with a vote for or against the Liberal party
at the last election.
We expect that the Chrétien government is more responsive to
public majorities that support the Liberal party. We also expect that
Canadians who voted for the Liberals in the last election will support the
policies of the Liberal government more often than those who voted for the
opposition or abstained. It is therefore hypothesized that the coefficient
for the Liberal support variable will be positive. From Model 5, we see
that the additive effect of Liberal support is statistically significant
and positive. The odds of consistency are multiplied by approximately four
when a public majority is positively associated with Liberal support.
However, the coefficient for the change × Liberal interaction
variable in Model 6 is not statistically significant. This suggests that
the effect of the variables for change and Liberal vote on consistency is
additive rather than multiplicative. The Chrétien government is
significantly more responsive to public majorities that support the
Liberal party whether they prefer policy change or the status quo. Note
also that Models 5 and 6 offer the best fit (R2 = .25). This is
testimony to the powerful impact of public ideology on government
responsiveness.
Conclusion
In this research, we attempted to provide convincing explanations as
to why the government of Jean Chrétien was so much less responsive
to majority opinion as measured by polls than the Mulroney government. It
is now time to summarize our main findings and discuss their
implications.
The analysis shows that lower responsiveness during the government of
Jean Chrétien cannot be attributed to methodological reasons alone.
There are also substantive explanations for the decline in consistency
after 1993. Low responsiveness during the Chrétien government is
associated with an increased bias against change in policy making as
compared with the Mulroney government. The data suggest that the
Chrétien government was significantly less responsive when mass
opinion favoured a change of policy than when it supported already
existing policy. Remarkably, there was no such bias against change and in
favour of the status quo in policy making during the government of Brian
Mulroney. The Mulroney government deferred to mass opinion more often when
the public favoured policy change.
The increase in government resistance to change does not completely
account for the difference in consistency from Mulroney to
Chrétien, however. Another explanation for the observed variation
in consistency is ideology. There is evidence that public majorities have
supported the conservative side on a large number of issues throughout the
period of analysis. It is no coincidence, therefore, that public opinion
was highly consistent with the conservative policies of the government of
Brian Mulroney, and that the election of the more liberal government of
Jean Chrétien has led to lower consistency after 1993. The data
also show that public majorities that were associated with Liberal party
support were more likely to get what they wanted from the Chrétien
government, irrespective of whether that was a policy change or the status
quo. The Chrétien government appears to have been especially
unresponsive on issues that were favoured by opposition parties'
supporters. This suggests that officials in the Chrétien government
made a distinction between the opinion of all Canadians and a Liberal
public opinion, and that they were prepared to be more responsive toward
the latter because it was more important to them. The finding could also
be interpreted to mean that public majorities consisting of many Canadians
who had voted for the Liberal party at the last election were more likely
to support the policies of the Liberal government.
Our diagnosis is of course limited by the quantitative nature of our
design. This research raises several important questions that cannot be
answered in full at the moment because we could not address them
satisfactorily within a quantitative framework. Only further qualitative
research will allow for a proper response.16
We are currently pursuing such qualitative research involving
elite interviews and tracing the opinion-policy relationship on an
issue-by-issue basis using the case study method. For preliminary results
of this research, see Mendelsohn and Petry (2001).
First, we have interpreted low
consistency to mean that the Chrétien government was unresponsive
to public opinion. An entirely different interpretation of low consistency
during the Chrétien period is of course possible. This would not be
because of the Chrétien government's
unresponsiveness—i.e., democratic frustration—but because the
Mulroney government was more successful at persuading the public to
support its policy positions—i.e., counterfeit consensus. It is also
likely that institutional factors had an impact on low consistency
although we could not test this impact empirically. The Liberal government
of Jean Chrétien has governed in a period of unique division on the
opposition benches and the perceived lack of a credible alternative
government. Such a situation may have contributed to a lack of
responsiveness, with the governing party feeling less vulnerable and less
inclined to be highly responsive to mass opinion.
Another limit we faced in this quantitative analysis was that we could
only measure consistency on equally weighted issues, although some issues
clearly have a higher profile than others. We think that the
considerations surrounding high profile issues are directly relevant to
the apparent paradox of presumed attentiveness to public opinion and
actual low responsiveness that was raised in the introduction. Actually,
there is a further enigma involved here. If the policies of the
Chrétien government were unresponsive to mass opinion
or—using the alternative formulation—if a majority of the
Canadian public does not support the policies of their government on a
large number of issues, why then do Canadians keep re-electing the same
party in government? Is it because Canadians are unaware that their
government is unresponsive? We think that the answer depends largely on
whether the issue is high profile or not. Recent electoral research
suggests that Canadians are indeed aware when government is or is not
responsive on high profile issues and rewards or punishes the government
accordingly. Nevitte et al. (2000) show that
government responsiveness on high profile issues such as deficit reduction
generated extra support for the Liberal government in the 1997 election,
and government non-responsiveness to public opinion on high profile issues
such as keeping the GST cost the government some votes in the same
election. Consequently, government officials have an incentive to be
responsive to mass opinion as measured by polls on high profile issues.
But on other, less important issues, whether the government is responsive
or not—or whether Canadians agree or disagree with government
policy—does not seem to have a perceptible effect on electoral
support. We interpret this to mean that the Canadian public is either
unaware of or unmoved by government non-responsiveness on lower profile
issues. Since they anticipate that non-responsiveness on low profile
issues is unlikely to cost them votes at the next election, government
officials will be free to be non-responsive or to respond to their own
definitions of public opinion on lower profile issues.
A related explanation as to why Canadians keep re-electing the
Liberals despite government lack of responsiveness is that their
assessment of government performance on high profile issues at election
time is disconnected from their opinion of the day-to-day low profile
decisions of the Chrétien government. A majority of Canadians did
indeed support Jean Chrétien on his two most vital initiatives
(deficit elimination and Canadian unity) whereas they were more ambivalent
on lower profile issues. Interestingly, the pattern of public support (or
government responsiveness) on high vs. low profile issues is reversed
under Brian Mulroney. Whereas the Canadian public supported most of the
Mulroney government's day-to-day decisions, the two most important
measures enacted by the government (the Free Trade Agreement and the Goods
and Services Tax) were never popular with the masses. The evidence
suggests a counterintuitive negative correlation between government
popularity (and attentiveness) on high profile issues and government
responsiveness on lower profile issues. The more responsive government of
Brian Mulroney was also less popular than the less responsive government
of Jean Chrétien. However, the expected positive correlation is
reestablished when consistency is redefined based on high profile issues
only. Government popularity has perhaps less to do with responsiveness to
mass opinion on day-to-day issues than to public preference on high
profile issues.
Acknowledgments
This study was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada. We wish to thank Mélisa Leclerc and
Guillaume Laperierre for their research assistance and the
Journal's anonymous referees for their suggestions.
