We the People: How Public Opinion towards Multiculturalism Shapes Political Outcomes

Programme Group Challenges to Democratic Representation

This NWO VENI funded project analyzes to what extent, how, and under which conditions public preferences shape policy outcomes in the Netherlands.

Funded by: NWO VENI

Period:  05/02/2014 until 04/02/2017

Public control over policy outcomes plays a central role in democratic government. It remains an open empirical question, however, whether or not public opinion actually shapes public policy.  The focus of this project will be on the policy domain of multiculturalism for both its societal and academic relevance. 

The project not only seeks to establish whether election outcomes and policy emenate from public preferences, but also how and under which conditions public influence impacts policymakers. The 'dynamic representation' framework provides analytical tools to analyze the opinion-policy link. It states that the electorate shapes policy by selecting policymakers and by altering the behavior of policymakers in office. This framework is refined by incorporating issue salience and uprooting it from its majoritarian origins to the Dutch multiparty context.

Research Methods 

In order to move beyond mere associations between public attitudes and elite behavior to actual causal claims of 'who influences who', longitudinal measures are indispensable. This, in turn, calls for extensive primary data collection. Annual measures of public opinion and policy in the realm of multiculturalism shall be constructed that go back to the 1970s. This information shall be combined from a host of survey sources and complement this with original content analysis of policy documents and a collection of data on various other policy outputs in the issue domain. This enables quantitative methods of analysis such as time-series regression to disentangle the causal ambiguity between the key variables.

Applying the dynamic representation framework to the debate on multiculturalism enables to further develop and refine an influential approach to political representation, while also providing an explanatory framework through which we can understand the degree to which political decisions in an acutely relevant policy domain have their basis in citizen preferences. As such, this project carries important theoretical and empirical implications for current debates among scholars, policymakers, journalists, and the general public on the quality of representative government in the Netherlands.

Published by  AISSR

3 October 2013