Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Esaiasson, Peter
• Gilljam, Mikael
• Persson, Mikael
• Essaiasson, Peter
• Wlezien, Christopher

Titel

Responsiveness Beyond Policy Satisfaction: Does It Matter to Citizens?

Ist Teil von

• Comparative political studies, 2017-05, Vol.50 (6), p.739-765

Ort / Verlag

Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Can politicians facilitate citizen acceptance of unwelcome policy decisions by acting responsively during the decision-making process? We suggest a framework to analyze the responsiveness–acceptance connection and report findings from two studies designed for that purpose. First, we ran a survey experiment to examine how exogenously induced responsiveness actions affect reactions to a policy decision. Second, we conducted a case study to see how results hold up in a real-world setting. We find that responsiveness actions are rewarded provided that citizens are convinced that politicians have paid attention to their wishes and views. Responsiveness actions that signal willingness to communicate (“to listen” and “to explain”) are more effective than the action to follow majority opinion (“to adapt”). However, the responsiveness–acceptance connection is sensitive to perceptual bias; policy losers are hard pressed to accept that politicians have indeed acted responsively.