The welfare reality check: how policy-specific information influences public responsiveness

Abstract

Democratic responsiveness implies that politicians are expected to be responsive to public demands and needs but also that the public is expected to respond to actual policies and reforms by adjusting their demands. What is often over-looked is that policy-specific knowledge is imperative for public policy responsiveness to send correct signals. By using survey experiments, we tested the effects of policy-specific information on policy preferences for privatization of welfare services in Sweden. In line with the thermostatic model, we expected information on the increase of privatization to show negative correlations with demand for more privatization. The experiments showed that policy preferences changed in most policy areas when policy-specific facts were provided. The negative effects of information about privatization were most pronounced among centre-left respondents, increasing the left-right polarization. The results suggest that policy-specific knowledge can serve as a useful mechanism in order to meet the identified theoretical need to strengthen the causal relationship in theories of public responsiveness. The study adds important knowledge to how we understand public responsiveness, and highlight the need of “reality checks” when analysing policy demands.