TY - JOUR
T1 - You Can’t Always Get What You Want
T2 - How Majority-Party Agenda Setting and Ignored Alternatives Shape Public Attitudes
AU - Harbridge-Yong, Laurel
AU - Paris, Celia
N1 - Funding Information:
). This research has been sponsored by the Graduate School at Northwestern University and the Time Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences. The authors would like to thank David Doherty for sharing survey data with us for this project, and the reviewers and editor at LSQ for their insightful feedback. Replication files are available in the Legislative Studies Quarterly Harvard Dataverse (Harbridge‐Yong and Paris
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Agenda setting is central to the study of legislatures and has profound implications for policy outcomes—yet little is known about how the public reacts to agenda setting and to majority-party decisions to ignore alternative proposals. We hypothesize that voters will be less satisfied with policy decisions when they are made aware of ignored alternatives. Drawing on literature on procedural fairness and partisan identity, we offer competing predictions for whether all respondents or only minority-party voters will oppose agenda setting and whether the strongest negative reaction will be elicited when bipartisan alternatives or minority-party proposals are ignored. Through a series of experiments, we show that information about agenda setting can drive down public support for legislation and for Congress as a whole and reduce the perceived fairness of the legislative process. Importantly, these effects are not confined to cases where popular policy alternatives are ignored or where one’s own party loses out.
AB - Agenda setting is central to the study of legislatures and has profound implications for policy outcomes—yet little is known about how the public reacts to agenda setting and to majority-party decisions to ignore alternative proposals. We hypothesize that voters will be less satisfied with policy decisions when they are made aware of ignored alternatives. Drawing on literature on procedural fairness and partisan identity, we offer competing predictions for whether all respondents or only minority-party voters will oppose agenda setting and whether the strongest negative reaction will be elicited when bipartisan alternatives or minority-party proposals are ignored. Through a series of experiments, we show that information about agenda setting can drive down public support for legislation and for Congress as a whole and reduce the perceived fairness of the legislative process. Importantly, these effects are not confined to cases where popular policy alternatives are ignored or where one’s own party loses out.
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U2 - 10.1111/lsq.12279
DO - 10.1111/lsq.12279
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85080081767
JO - Legislative Studies Quarterly
JF - Legislative Studies Quarterly
SN - 0362-9805
ER -