Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: The Conditional Nature of Administrative Responsiveness to Public Opinion

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

Primary Investigators: Dennis Chong and Julia Rabinovich Title: Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Conditional Nature of Administrative Responsiveness to Public Opinion. 0719506 Abstract This project is one of the first to explicitly study the theoretical and empirical relationship between public opinion and the policies of unelected administrative agencies across the U.S. states. The research will develop a new theory that explains how legislative oversight, the main mechanism connecting legislative and executive institutions, affects both administrative policy-making and, consequently, administrative responsiveness to public opinion. Empirically, the study will examine the impact of the public's policy preferences on telecommunications policies enacted by state public utility commissions. To address the question of policy responsiveness, this research will conduct state-level representative sample public opinion surveys of citizens' knowledge of and attitudes toward telecommunications regulatory policies. This study has several broader impacts. First, the survey will provide data on citizens' understanding of regulatory policies, a topic on which the field has sufficiently more theory and speculation than data. The data can be used to assess whether policies are responsive to the public's current, uninformed preferences or their latent preferences (the preferences the public would have were it fully informed about policy choices). Second, the survey is useful to the study of other comparative institutional and electoral contexts in the American States. The survey will provide data that will make it possible to study the impact of the intensity of partisan conflicts on administrative responsiveness, and the differences in administrative responsiveness between elected and appointed public utility commissioners. Lastly, the survey will interest scholars who study individual-level political behavior. The variability of political conditions across states would allow scholars to examine the role of institutional and economic factors in the attitudes formation processes, such as the impact of partisan versus nonpartisan elections on the relationship between individuals' partisanship and their policy preferences. Moreover, the data from state public opinion surveys will provide an opportunity to examine the relationship between the public's regulatory policy preferences and the standard measures of state ideology, which do not include direct measures of regulatory politics.