Public attitudes toward risk tradeoffs in energy policy choices. Final report

Policy beyond politics? Public opinion, party politics and the French pro-nuclear energy policy

Journal of Public Policy ◽

10.1017/s0143814x14000221 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 35 (1) ◽

pp. 137-170 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Sylvain Brouard ◽

Isabelle Guinaudeau

Keyword(s):

Public Opinion ◽

Interest Groups ◽

Energy Policy ◽

Nuclear Energy ◽

Path Dependence ◽

Public Attitudes ◽

Original Data ◽

Policy Choices ◽

The Media ◽

Nuclear Energy Policy

AbstractAt first sight, French nuclear energy policy offers a textbook example of how technical, constitutional and economic restrictions, powerful interest groups and path dependence constrain democratic responsiveness. This paper uses what might seem to be an unlikely case in order to question explanations of policy choices in terms of technocracy, path dependence and interest groups against the background of an under-estimated factor: party and coalition strategies. The original data collected on public attitudes towards nuclear energy and the attention dedicated to this issue in the media, as well as in the parliamentary and electoral arenas, show that the effect of public opinion is conditioned by party incentives to politicise the issue at stake. In other words, parties and coalition-making constraints act as a mediating variable between citizens’ preferences and policy choices. These findings point to the need to integrate this conditional variable into analyses of responsiveness and models of policymaking.

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Intervention and Intransitivity: Public Opinion, Social Choice, and the Use of Military Force Abroad

World Politics ◽

10.1017/s0043887100015203 ◽

1995 ◽

Vol 47 (4) ◽

pp. 534-554 ◽

Cited By ~ 21

Author(s):

Kurt Taylor Gaubatz

Keyword(s):

Foreign Policy ◽

Public Opinion ◽

Social Choice ◽

Public Attitudes ◽

Decision Makers ◽

Military Force ◽

Public Preferences ◽

Policy Choices ◽

The Impact

This article argues that the problems identified in the literature on public choice should critically affect our research on public opinion and our understanding of the impact of public opinion on foreign policy. While a robust literature has emerged around social choice issues in political science, there has been remarkably little appreciation for these problems in the literature on public opinion in general and on public opinion and foreign policy in particular. The potential importance of social choice problems for understanding the nature and role of public opinion in foreign policy making is demonstrated through an examination of American public attitudes about military intervention abroad. In particular, drawing on several common descriptions of the underlying dimensionality of public attitudes on major foreign policy issues, it is shown that there may be important intransitivities in the ordering of public preferences at the aggregate level on policy choices such as those considered by American decision makers in the period leading up to the Gulf War. Without new approaches to public-opinion polling that take these problems into consideration, it will be difficult to make credible claims about the role of public opinion in theforeignpolicy process.

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