New study on the congruence between public opinion and policy in Europe

The new GovLis paper “the opinion-policy nexus in Europe and the role of politicial institutions” studies the relations between public opinion and policy on 20 policy issues in 31 European Democracies. In it, Anne Rasmussen, Stefanie Reher and Dimiter Toshkov find that there is a strong relationship between public opinion and policy, as well as a substantial degree of congruence between public opinion and policy. However, they find only limited effects of institutional factors, such as a country’s electoral system and the horizontal and vertical divisions of powers. The paper is forthcoming in the European Journal of Political Research and can be accessed here.