Dynamic Representation in the United States: Effects of the Public Mood on Governors' Agendas

• Published date: 01 March 1997
• Author: Daniel DiLeo
• DOI: 10.1177/0160323X9702900204
• Date: 01 March 1997
• Subject Matter: General Interest

98 State and Local Government Review

State an d Local Government Review

Vol. 29, No. 2 (Spring 1997): 98-109

IN THE UNITED STATE S , shifts in the pub -

lic mood that relate to public policy

can translate into policy shifts through

two mechanisms. The first, more obvious

mechanism replaces elected offi cials who rep-

resent the old mood (i.e., incumbents) with

officials whose agendas coincide more closely

with the public’s new mood. In the second

mechanism, elected officials respond to their

perceptions of mood changes by revising

their agendas before the public expresses its

will at the ballot box.1 At the national level,

both processes are at work. Changes in mood

result not only in the election of officials who

better reflect the new mood (the replacement

mechanism) but also in adjustments by in-

cumbent officials according to shifts in the

public mood, a process describ ed as the “dy-

namic representation” mechanism (Stimson,

MacKuen, and Erikson 1995).

There is reason to believe that both pro-

cesses are at work at the level of state govern-

ment as well. As governors have become in-

creasingly competent and assertive, we have

come to think of them as innovators, acting

on their own initiative rather than respond-

ing to public opinion (Osborne 1990). Most

former gover no rs, in fact, view the governor’s

role as that of an “issue catalyst” (Beyle 1996,

239). Nevertheless, as state-level public opin-

Dynamic Representation in the United States:

Effects of the Public Mood on

Governors’ Agendas

Daniel DiLeo

ion polls become more common, they are

having a significant impact on the success of

governors’ administrations (Beyle 1996, 226-

27). We should not be surprised if governors,

like members of the U.S. Congress, empha-

size policies that coincide with the public

mood and defer policies that are at odds

with it.

Public Mood/Public Policy

Cross-sectional studies of public mood and

policy demonstrate that, over time, policy in

the states has responded to public ideology

fairly well, resulting in a high level of corre-

spondence between the two (Erikson, Wright,

and McIver 1993) and a fairly high level

of public satisfac tion with state government

(Roeder 1994). However, we have yet to

specify the mechanism responsible for this

high degree of correspondence.

Distinguishing between policy change

through the replacement mechanism and

policy change through the dynamic represen-

tation mechanism requires, at the very least,

a time series of public mood and a corre-

sponding time series of some measure of pub-

lic officials’ policy-making behavior. Stim-

son’s measure of public mood provides the

first of the requisite time series. The princi-

pal difficulty with using this measure for ex-