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Public Opinion and Policy Change in the American States

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Virginia Gray

University of Minnesota

Gregory Hager

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This article explores the relationship between public opinion and nonincremental policy change by extending the analysis of Wright et al. (1985, 1987). We develop a two-step model in which we first relate the level of a relevant outcome measure of a policy to the degree of opinion liberalism, the strategy of Wright and his colleagues. Then we posit that policy shocks will move the policy system into greater policy-opinion congruence. The model is tested for two policy areas that have undergone nonincremental change over the late 1970s and early 1980s: tax policy and education policy.

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