The responsive public - Issue salience, policy change, and preferences for European unification

One little-noted requirement for the proper functioning of democratic institutions is public responsiveness to policy. A responsive public would adjust its preference for 'more' or 'less' policy in reaction to what policymakers do. In this article we set out a theoretical model of how the salience of the issue domain conditions the feedback of policy outputs on public preferences, and we then show how this model can be applied in the European case. In assessing the model we employ data from all Eurobarometer surveys conducted in the 24-year period between 1971 and 1994 together with policy data from the Official Journal of the EC/EU. Our findings suggest that public preferences regarding European unification do reflect policy, though only as the salience of the domain has increased over time.