Final Report Summary - RESPONSIVEGOV (Democratic Responsiveness in Comparative Perspective: How Do Democratic Governments Respond to Different Expressions of Public Opinion?)
The ResponsiveGov project was a seven-year (2011-2018) research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under its 7th Framework Programme (FP7) with a ‘Starting Grant’. Its main aim was to study democratic responsiveness in comparative perspective. The ResponsiveGov project seeks to answer the following questions: To what extent are democratic governments responsive to citizens’ demands and preferences between elections? Are governments more likely to be responsive to the interpretation of public opinion through surveys or to collectively and publicly expressed opinion - often in the form of protests? When does one or the other type of expression prevail as a mechanism to foster governmental responsiveness? Are certain institutional configurations more likely to make governments responsive to citizens’ preferences between elections? The ResponsiveGov project addressed these questions with a comparative study of governmental responsiveness in more than 20 established western democracies. The principal investigator (PI) was Professor Laura Morales, and the project was based at the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Leicester (United Kingdom) until September 2017, and at Sciences Po, CEE (France) between October 2017 and its completion in February 2018.
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
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