Final Report Summary - RESPONSIVEGOV (Democratic Responsiveness in Comparative Perspective: How Do Democratic Governments Respond to Different Expressions of Public Opinion?)
The ResponsiveGov project (see website here: http://www.responsivegov.eu/) has:
(1) Offered new theoretical and conceptual insights for the study of government responsiveness;
(2) Innovated the study of responsiveness by introducing novel research design elements that allow to capture the complexity of the inputs that governments receive when deciding on which policies to pursue;
(3) Proposed, produced, tested, reviewed and consolidated new data collection instruments – its data collection codebook and data collection template – to allow for the systematic measurement of all these inputs;
(4) Undertaken data collection for four policy cases: (i) nuclear energy policy after the Fukushima accident, (ii) policies on the regulation of copyrights protection on the internet, (iii) policies on the regulation of genetically modified organisms, and (iv) the regulation of the financial sector after the 2008 financial crash (both banking activities and the regulation of bankers' remuneration).;
(5) Produced a number of publications, conference papers and presentations and other dissemination outputs that outline the key findings of the research.
The ResponsiveGov project has employed a project administrator, 6 junior researchers and 2 PhD students throughout its duration, and has engaged dozens of student assistants. The data will be shared in open access on its Harvard Dataverse site: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/responsivegovproject