The most prevalent approach, often labeled “dyadic representation,” examines the relationship between constituency opinion and the behavior of representatives or candidates across political units like U.S. states or congressional districts.81 This work typically finds strong correlations between constituents’ preferences and legislators’ voting behavior.

A second approach examines changes over time in public preferences and the corresponding changes (or lack of changes) in public policies. For example, if support for spending on space exploration declines over some period of time, does actual spending on the space program also decline? Using this technique, Page and Shapiro found fairly high levels of congruence between the direction of change in opinion and the direction of change in government policy, especially for salient issues or cases with large changes in public preferences.82 Robert Erikson, Michael MacKuen, and James Stimson also related changes in public preferences to subsequent government policy.83 Rather than focusing on individual policy issues, however, Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson used a broad measure of “public mood” concerning the size and scope of government and a similarly broad measure of actual government policy. Taking into account the reciprocal relationship between public preferences and government policy, they report an extremely strong influence of public mood on policy outputs, concluding that there exists “nearly a one-to-one translation of preferences into policy.”

Finally, using a third approach, Alan Monroe compared public preferences for policy change expressed at a given time with subsequent changes (or lack of changes) in government policy.85 For example, if the public expresses a preference for cutting spending on space exploration at a given time, does actual spending on the space program decline in the following years? Monroe found only modest consistency between public preferences and subsequent policy change during the 1960s and 1970s and even less consistency during 1980s and 1990s. Mirroring Page and Shapiro’s results, however, Monroe found a better match between public preferences and government policy for issues that the public deemed more important.

Martin Gilens, Affluence and influence: economic inequality and political power in America, Princeton, NJ Oxford, 2012, p. 61