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The Public Thermostat, Political Responsiveness and Error-Correction: Border Control and Asylum in Britain, 1994–2007

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2009

Will Jennings
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Abstract

The responsiveness of government to the preferences of its citizens is considered to be an important indicator of the performance of advanced democracy. This article argues that the thermostatic model of policy/opinion responsiveness can be represented in the form of an error-correction model where policy and public opinion variables are cointegrated, and extends the focus of investigation to government outputs. This models the short-run and long-run equilibrium of interactions between public opinion and policy/bureaucratic outputs. The article assesses the performance of British government – and, in particular, the Immigration and Nationality Directorate of the Home Office – in the operation of border controls and administration of claims for asylum, for the period between 1994 and 2007.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 847 - 870
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

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6 E.g. Robert S. Erikson, Michael B. MacKuen and James A. Stimson, The Macro Polity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Robert S. Erikson, Gerald C. Wright and John P. McIver, Statehouse Democracy: Public Opinion and the American States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Stuart N. Soroka and Christopher Wlezien, ‘Opinion Representation and Policy Feedback: Canada in Comparative Perspective’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 37 (2004), 331–59; Stuart N. Soroka and Christopher Wlezien, ‘Opinion–Policy Dynamics: Public Preferences and Public Expenditure in the United Kingdom’, British Journal of Political Science, 35 (2005), 665–89; James A. Stimson, Public Opinion in America (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991); James A. Stimson, Michael B. MacKuen and Robert S. Erikson, ‘Dynamic Representation’, American Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 543–65; Christopher Wlezien, ‘The Public as Thermostat: Dynamics of Preferences for Spending’, American Journal of Political Science, 39 (1995), 981–1000; Christopher Wlezien, ‘Dynamics of Representation: The Case of U.S. Spending on Defence’, British Journal of Political Science, 26 (1996), 81–103; Christopher Wlezien, ‘Patterns of Representation: Dynamics of Public Preferences and Policy’, Journal of Politics, 66 (2004), 1–24.

7 See Matthew D. McCubbins, ‘Legislative Design of Regulatory Structure’, American Journal of Political Science, 29 (1985), 721–48; McCubbins et al., ‘Administrative Procedures as Instruments of Political Control’; Matthew D. McCubbins, Roger G. Noll and Barry R. Weingast, ‘Structure and Process; Politics and Policy: Administrative Arrangements and the Political Control of Agencies’, Virginia Law Review, 75 (1989), 431–82; Barry R. Weingast, ‘The Congressional-Bureaucratic System: A Principal–Agent Perspective’, Public Choice, 44 (1984), 147–92; Barry R. Weingast and Mark J. Moran, ‘Bureaucratic Discretion or Congressional Control? Regulatory Policymaking by the Federal Trade Commission’, Journal of Political Economy, 91 (1983), 765–800.

8 E.g. Jonathan Bendor and Terry M. Moe. ‘An Adaptive Model of Bureaucratic Politics’, American Political Science Review, 79 (1985), 755–74; Jonathan Bendor and Terry M. Moe, ‘Agenda Control, Committee Capture and the Dynamics of Institutional Politics’, American Political Science Review, 80 (1986), 1187–208; Terry M. Moe, ‘Regulatory Performance and Presidential Administration’, American Journal of Political Science, 26 (1982), 197–224; B. Dan Wood, ‘Principals, Bureaucrats and Responsiveness in Clean Air Enforcements’, American Political Science Review, 82 (1988), 213–34; B. Dan Wood, ‘Federalism and Policy Responsiveness: The Clean Air Case’, Journal of Politics, 53 (1991), 851–9; B. Dan Wood and Richard W. Waterman, ‘The Dynamics of Political Control of the Bureaucracy’, American Political Science Review, 85 (1991), 801–28; B. Dan Wood and Richard W. Waterman, ‘The Dynamics of Political–Bureaucratic Adaption’, American Journal of Political Science, 37 (1993), 497–528; B. Dan Wood and Richard W. Waterman, Bureaucratic Dynamics: The Role of Bureaucracy in a Democracy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994).

9 Bagehot, The English Constitution.

10 See Kaare Strøm, ‘Delegation and accountability in parliamentary democracies’, European Journal of Political Research, 37 (2000), 261–89.

11 Wlezien, ‘The Public as Thermostat’; Wlezien, ‘Dynamics of Representation’; Wlezien, ‘Patterns of Representation’.

12 Wlezien, ‘The Public as Thermostat’.

13 This has theoretical foundations in systems theories of political behaviour, see Karl Deutsch, The Nerves of Government (New York: Free Press, 1963); David Easton, A Framework for Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965).

14 See Soroka and Wlezien, ‘Opinion Representation and Policy Feedback’; Soroka and Wlezien, ‘Opinion–Policy Dynamics’; Wlezien, ‘The Public as Thermostat’; Wlezien, ‘Dynamics of Representation’; Wlezien, ‘Patterns of Representation’.

15 For other scholars, the aggregate of individual preferences over the aggregate of issues is constituted in a public ‘mood’, where specific components of public preferences move together over time. This relationship is also found to be thermostatic because if there is ‘too much’ government liberalism, mood becomes more conservative, and if there is ‘too much’ government conservatism, mood becomes more liberal. See Erikson et al., The Macro Polity.

16 Soroka and Wlezien, ‘Opinion Representation and Policy Feedback’; Soroka and Wlezien, ‘Opinion–Policy Dynamics’; Wlezien, ‘Patterns of Representation’.

17 Erikson et al., The Macro Polity.

18 See Wlezien, ‘The Public as Thermostat’; Mark Franklin and Christopher Wlezien, ‘The Responsive Public’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 9 (1997), 347–63.

19 It is unfortunate that the ‘more’ or ‘less’ format of the Gallup Organization/General Social Survey question is not replicated in equivalent time series on public preferences. As a consequence, empirical studies of the public thermostat are limited in the extent to which they can test public responsiveness for matters other than budgetary expenditure.

20 Robert H. Durr, ‘What Moves Policy Sentiment?’ American Political Science Review, 87 (1993), 158–70; Suzanna De Boef and Jim Granato, ‘Near Integrated Data and the Analysis of Political Relationships’, American Journal of Political Science, 41 (1997), 619–40; Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier and Renée M. Smith, ‘The Dynamics of Aggregate Partisanship’, American Political Science Review, 90 (1996), 567–80.

21 Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, ‘Agenda Dynamics and Policy Subsystems’, Journal of Politics, 53 (1991), 1044–74; Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Bryan D. Jones, Reconceiving Decision-making in Democratic Politics: Attention, Choice, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Bryan D. Jones and Frank R. Baumgartner, The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

22 Christopher Wlezien, ‘On the Salience of Political Issues: The Problem with “Most Important Problem’’ ’, Electoral Studies, 24 (2005), 555–79.

23 Where studies use responses about the ‘most important problem’ (‘MIP’), this is not without its difficulties. There is an important distinction between the importance of an issue, and its importance relative to other issues; not to mention the extent to which it is considered to be either an ‘issue’ or a ‘problem’ by the public. See Wlezien, ‘On the Salience of Political Issues’.

24 W. Russell Neuman, ‘The Threshold of Public Attention’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 54 (1990), 159–76.

25 Arend Lijphart, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984).

26 Duncan Black, ‘On the Rationale of Group Decision-making’, Journal of Political Economy, 56 (1948), 23–34; Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper Collins, 1957).

27 This model captures the parallel components of political responsiveness to public opinion. First, indirect representation (γZt −1) results from prospective voting behaviour, see Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy, where the victorious election candidates tend to be more effective at representing the policy preferences of their constituencies. Secondly, direct responsiveness (βXdt −1) is motivated by ‘rational anticipation’ (see Stimson et al., ‘Dynamic Representation’, p. 545) of retrospective voting behaviour (see Morris P. Fiorina, Retrospective Voting in American National Elections (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981)), where elections allow the public to reward or punish actions of policy makers in previous time periods.

28 Soroka and Wlezien, ‘Opinion–Policy Dynamics’; Christopher Wlezien and Stuart Soroka, ‘Measures and Models of Budgetary Policy’, Policy Studies Journal, 31 (2003), 273–86.

29 Jones and Baumgartner, The Politics of Attention; Wlezien, ‘The Public as Thermostat’; Wlezien, ‘Dynamics of Representation’; Wlezien, ‘Patterns of Representation’.

30 Erikson et al., The Macro Polity; Stimson et al., ‘Dynamic Representation’.

31 Baumgartner and Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics; Jones and Baumgartner, The Politics of Attention.

32 Soroka and Wlezien, ‘Opinion Representation and Policy Feedback’; Soroka and Wlezien, ‘Opinion–Policy Dynamics’; Wlezien, ‘Patterns of Representation’.

33 For literature reviews, see Paul Burstein, ‘Bringing the Public Back In: Should Sociologists Consider the Impact of Public Opinion on Public Policy?’ Social Forces, 77 (1998), 27–62; Jeff Manza and Fay Lomax Cook, ‘Policy Responsiveness to Public Opinion: The State of the Debate’, in Jeff Manza, Fay Lomax Cook and Benjamin Page, eds, Navigating Public Opinion: Polls, Policy, and the Future of American Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Wlezien, ‘Patterns of Representation’.

34 The importance of ‘competence’ is implicit to valence models of political competition, For example, see Donald Stokes, ‘Valence Politics’, in Dennis Kavanagh, ed., Electoral Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 141–62.

35 In anecdotal terms, it is possible to explain trends in US policy mood from liberalism to conservatism in the late 1960s and 1970s as in part reflecting the prominent failures of government implementation of Great Society legislation. Indeed, public disillusionment with this (see ‘How Great Hopes in Washington are Dashed in Oakland …’, in Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky, Implementation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973)) arguably contributed to the ascent of conservatism and a public belief in ‘small government’. This represents not only an ideological shift in preferences, but also a pragmatic response to technical shortcomings of programme administration.

36 It is problematic that policy intentions are not always readily translated into bureaucratic outputs because the unit of analysis is not equivalent. For example, legislative appropriations as measured in dollars or pounds are not equal to construction of a specific number of hospitals or nuclear submarines. In other instances, legislative interventions are dichotomous variables so not easily equated with a transformation of continuous outputs.

37 Durr, ‘What Moves Policy Sentiment?’

38 Jones and Baumgartner, The Politics of Attention.

39 Clive W. J. Granger and Paul Newbold, ‘Spurious Regression in Economics’, Journal of Econometrics, 4 (1974), 111–20.

40 Gary King, Unifying Political Methodology: The Likelihood Theory of Statistical Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

41 Robert F. Engle and Clive W. J. Granger, ‘Co-integration and Error Correction: Representation, Estimation and Testing’, Econometrica, 55 (1987), 251–76.

42 Engle and Granger, ‘Co-integration and Error Correction’.

43 Søren Johansen, ‘Statistical Analysis of Cointegration Vectors’, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 12 (1988), 231–54; ‘Estimation and Hypothesis Testing of Cointegration in Gaussian Vector Autoregressive Models’, Econometrica, 59 (1991), 1551–80.

44 The category of ‘extraordinary leave to remain’ was abolished in March 2003 and replaced by categories of ‘humanitarian protection’ and ‘discretionary leave’.

45 On a case-by-case basis, the determination of applications for asylum is a zero-sum game. If an application is granted, it cannot be simultaneously refused or granted short-term leave to remain. However, applications are not necessarily processed in the same order as they are submitted, nor should it be assumed that this order is random. For example, fast-track facilities at the Oakington detention centre were used to determine cases that were ‘manifestly unfounded’ on the basis of country of origin via the initial screening interview.

46 Asylum Statistics Team, Immigration Research and Statistics Service (IRSS). Asylum in the United Kingdom, 1994-2004. Statistics for 1999 are completed with provisional data from the Home Office’s monthly statistical bulletin, Asylum Statistics: February 2000, United Kingdom. Statistics for 2004–07 are completed using the Home Office’s annual statistical bulletin, Asylum Statistics United Kingdom.

47 MORI, Political Monitor 1974–2005. See http://www.ipsos-mori.com/content/the-most-important-issues-facing-britain-today.ashx.

48 See MORI, The More Things Change … Government, the Economy and Public Services since the 1970s (London: MORI, 2003), p. 23.

49 Said E. Said and David A. Dickey, ‘Testing for Unit Roots in Autoregressive Moving Average Models of Unknown Order’, Biometrika, 71 (1984), 599–607.

50 Denis Kwiatkowski, Peter C. B. Phillips, Peter Schmidt and Yongcheol Shin, ‘Testing the Null Hypothesis of Stationarity against the Alternative of a Unit Root: How Sure Are We That Economic Time Series Have a Unit Root?’, Journal of Econometrics, 54 (1992), 159–78.

51 De Boef and Granato, ‘Near Integrated Data and the Analysis of Political Relationships’; Box-Steffensmeier and Smith, ‘The Dynamics of Aggregate Partisanship’; Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier and Renée M. Smith, ‘Investigating Political Dynamics Using Fractional Integration Methods’, American Political Science Review, 42 (1998), 661–89.

52 Johansen, ‘Statistical Analysis of Cointegration Vectors’; ‘Estimation and Hypothesis Testing of Cointegration in Gaussian Vector Autoregressive Models’.

53 The normalized values are translated through multiplication of the coefficient (0.399) by the maximum actual value for applications (22,760), divided by the maximum actual value for public opinion (42.5).

54 Carlos M. Jarque and Anil K. Bera, ‘A Test for Normality of Observations and Regression Residuals’, International Statistical Review, 55 (1987), 163–72.

55 Based on Ralph B. D’Agostino, Albert Belanger and Ralph B. D’Agostino Jr, ‘A Suggestion for Using Powerful and Informative Tests of Normality’, American Statistician, 44 (1990), 316–21; Patrick Royston, ‘Comment on sg3.4 and an Improved D’Agostino Test’, Stata Technical Bulletin, 3 (1991), 13–24.

56 See Soroka and Wlezien, ‘Opinion Representation and Policy Feedback’; Soroka and Wlezien, ‘Opinion–Policy Dynamics’; Wlezien, ‘The Public as Thermostat’; Wlezien, ‘Dynamics of Representation’; Wlezien, ‘Patterns of Representation’.

57 The Westminster model is based upon an implicit ‘bargain’ between the elected Cabinet and an unelected civil service, see Richard E. Neustadt, ‘White House and Whitehall’, in Anthony King, ed., The British Prime Minister (London: Macmillan, 1969).

58 Baumgartner and Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics; Jones and Baumgartner, The Politics of Attention.

59 Soroka and Wlezien, ‘Opinion Representation and Policy Feedback’; Soroka and Wlezien, ‘Opinion-Policy Dynamics’; Wlezien, ‘The Public as Thermostat’; Wlezien, ‘Dynamics of Representation’; Wlezien, ‘Patterns of Representation’.

60 Baumgartner and Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics; Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder, News that Matters: Television and American Opinion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); John R. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

61 MORI, You Are What You Read? How Newspaper Readership Is Related to Views (London: MORI, 2005).

62 MORI, ‘Public Attitudes to Public Services’, March 2004 (www.mori.com/polls/2004/cabinet-office.shtml).

63 ICM Research Ltd, ‘Public Attitudes to Public Services’, June 2004 and September 2004 (www.icmresearch.co.uk/reviews/2004/govt-depts-public-services/govt-depts-public-services-june-sept-2004.asp).