Record Details


Field	Value

Title	Replication Data for: Are Policy-Makers Responsive to Public Demand in Climate Politics?

Identifier	https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WPRN15

Creator	Schaffer, Lena Maria Oehl, Bianca Bernauer, Thomas

Publisher	Harvard Dataverse

Description	Normative theories of democracy agree that public demand should be the main guide in policy-making. But positive theories and related empirical research disagree about the extent to which this holds true in reality. We address this debate with an empirical focus on climate change policy. Specifically, we are interested in whether observable variation in public demand for climate change mitigation can help explain variation in adopted national climate policies. Using new data to approximate public demand, we estimate the responsiveness of policy-makers to changes in public demand in six OECD countries from 1995 to 2010. We find that policy-makers are responsive and react in predicted ways to variation in our opinion component of measured public demand, rather than to the mere salience of the climate issue. The effect of issue salience is strongest in combination with opinion as this creates a scope for action. These results underscore the importance and usefulness of our concept and our empirical measures for public demand, as well as the disaggregated analysis of policy outputs in this area.

Subject	Social Sciences policy responsiveness climate change policy public demand

Contributor	Schaffer, Lena

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