Paper to be discussed at the 2009 CPA Conference. Institutional friction and political representation in Spain

Transcription

1 1 Paper to be discussed at the 2009 CPA Conference Institutional friction and political representation in Spain Laura Chaqués and Anna Palau Political Science Department University of Barcelona Avda. Diagonal, 690; Barcelona Tel Work in progress, please do not quote A previous version of this paper was presented at the ECPR, joint sessions (Lisbon 2009). We would like to thank all the comments, especially Thomas D. Lancaster, and also Luz Muñoz, Lluis Medir, Ferran Davesa and John Wilkerson suggestions to improve this paper. The research for this paper is an output of the project The Politics of attention: West European politics in times of change: the case of Spain, funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Plan Nacional de Investigación Científica, acciones complementarias (SEJ E/SOCI), as a part of the Eurocores ECPR 2007, of the European Science Foundation (ESF).

2 2 Abstract This paper analyses how well the priorities of the Spanish public opinion, assessed by the Most Important Problem query in the CIS poll, match the activities of policymakers over different policymaking channels: laws, bills, oral questions and annual speeches by the Prime Ministry. Following the Policy Agendas methodology, the paper analyses from 1994 to 2007 and across 19 issue areas, the evolution of these policy instruments across time in order to explain why changes in responsiveness occur. The main goal is to test the institutional friction hypothesis (Baumgartner and Jones 1993, Jones et al. 2009) and to see whether parliamentary activities are more responsive to citizens preferences than other policy making channels in order to evaluate democratic governance. The main conclusions are that public and policymaker priorities are inversely related to institutional friction; and that the correspondence between the prioritization of issues by the public and policy activity is higher at the agenda setting stage than at the decision-making stage.

3 3 Introduction The analysis of the relationship between public preferences and public policy is one of the most important concerns in democratic theory. From different perspectives scholars have analyzed the correspondence between public opinion and political behaviour as a means to have a better understanding of the functioning of democracy 1. In this paper we build on the work developed by Jones and Baumgartner (2005) and Jones, Larsen-Price and Wilkerson et al. (2009) on the study of political representation. In this view, representation is seen as a part of a democratic signal detection system that alerts policymakers to the anxieties and wishes of the public (Jones and Baumgartner 2005:249). Policymakers are attentive to public preferences and respond to public concerns over time. Correspondence between public concerns and policymaker s activities is expected mainly because politicians are not simply problem solvers that respond rationally to problems or crisis situations. Public preferences, expressed in opinion polls give information about how citizen s detects and prioritizes issues, but they are just one of the variables driving changes in political attention. What public opinion considers being the most important issue of the moment facing the country is one of the numerous signals about changes in the environment that representatives consider while taking political decisions. A salient focusing event would probably lead to political attention even if there was no simultaneous increase in public concern (Bartels 1991). Other factors like elections bringing new administrations to power; new partisan or ideological distributions to Parliament can be also powerful agenda setters. They create new opportunities to push some problems and solutions to the fore and (equally important) to suppress others. Besides the responsibilities of any executive or political party (such as foreign affairs) go beyond public priorities and to some extend are constrained by the requirements imposed by daily activities. Policy actions and issue prioritization may also be driven by other actors like the media and interest groups. The will of the general public may be biased in favor of well-organized social groups, mainly business and professional groups that have a more direct access to the policy arena. The media is also a powerful agenda setter (Soroka 2002, McCombs and Shaw 1972, McCombs 2004). The salience of both issues and their attributes on the media influences the salience of those issues and attributes on the public and political agenda. Finally, political representation also varies according to the type of issues. Elected officials are particularly responsive to citizen s preferences on highly visible and salient issues, but not on those issues where citizens tend to be less involved and have less information (Page and Shapiro 1983, Jones 1994). 1 There is a large and growing literature about these issues. For a review see Page and Shapiro 1983, Page 1994, Burstein 2003 among others.

4 4 Political representation studies have dealt with the analysis of the correspondence between public preferences and policy activity following different approaches (Page 1994). A large part of the empirical analysis of political representation focuses on policy positions addressing the question of whether there is correspondence between legislators policy positions often measured by roll call votes and their constituent s policy preferences measured by opinion polls (e.g. Miller and Stokes 1963, Weisberg 1978, Burden 2007). In this approach, each issue is considered as having equal importance to the public (terrorism and housing are equivalent); and in most cases the analysis is focused in the decision making stage of the policy making process. Very recent agenda setting research is going further in the analysis, attempting to compare the changing issue preferences of the public to those of policymakers (Jones et al. 2009). Following this agenda setting perspective, this paper is aimed to give an explanation about the relationship between changes in citizen s preferences and changes in policy decisions at the macro level for the Spanish case (Page and Shapiro 1983, Jones et al. 2009). The analysis of political representation in this paper is mainly empirical, and focused in the Spanish case 2. Our goal is to analyze what types of institutions within the Spanish political system are more responsive to citizen s preferences; to what extend the issues that the Spanish public opinion considers to be the most salient are also identified as important by parliamentary groups and the executive across different policy-making channels (laws, bills, oral questions and annual speeches by the Prime Ministry).; and to what extend the correspondence between parliamentary activities and the public agenda are related to institutional friction (Jones et al. 2009). While giving an answer to these questions we also explore the relevance of the type of government upon political responsiveness. For some authors, parliamentary democracies are less responsive to the public mainly because the executive controls the policy making process the executive is introducing most of the bills, most of these bills are passed, and the legislature has a limited power to control governmental initiatives. The results we present here for the Spanish case are a point of departure to go further on this question about whether parliamentary democracies are less responsive to public priorities. Correspondence between public opinion and policy actions also depends on how political power is organized and distributed across different levels of governments. One of the main characteristics of the Spanish political system is its transformation into a multilevel system of government. Spain entry in the EEC in 1986 means a profound 2 This is in itself a contribution, as most empirical analysis about this link between political activities and public preferences are mainly related to the US case or to the analysis of particular case studies For the case of Spain see Morales and Ramiro (2004) or Chaqués, Palau, Muñoz and Wilkerson (2008).

5 5 transformation of the institutional scenario in which policy takes place reducing the autonomy of the Spanish government to take political decisions in its territory. Besides, democratization means the transformation of the territorial structure of the state from a unitary system with a low degree of decentralization to a quasi-federal state by the creation of the Comunidades Autónomas. Accordingly, we depart from the idea that political responsiveness would vary across different policy areas depending on the distribution of political competences across different levels of government. This is, we expect that the higher the level of political decentralization, the less correspondence between public opinion and parliamentary activities at the national level. Parliamentary and governmental actors at the national level are less responsive to public opinion for those issues of regional or local responsibility like housing for example. By the same token, the increasing fragmentation of the Spanish political system, and thus the increment in the number of governments involved in the policy making process makes less clear which government is doing what in the policy making process. For some, this process of increasing delegation of political power to subnational and supranational institutions makes governments and national parliaments less responsive to public preferences. In this sense, the analysis we present here is also a starting point to go on in the analysis of whether multilevel systems of government (federalism) are less responsive to public preferences. The main conclusions of the paper are that public and policymaker priorities are inversely related to institutional friction the higher the institutional friction the less responsive is a policy-making channel to citizen s preferences ; and that the correspondence between the prioritization of issues by the public and policy activity is higher at the agenda setting stage than at the decision-making stage. Responsiveness is also lower in those policy areas (like housing, or health issues) which are the jurisdiction of regional authorities, particularly at the decision making stage (bills and laws). As expected, correspondence is higher at the decision making stage for those issues under the jurisdiction of the central government (rights issues). The paper is organized as follows. The first part explains public and political agenda dynamics across multiple issue areas between 1994 and The second and third part of the paper analyzes public opinion correspondence with policy preferences across multiple policymaking channels and its relation to institutional friction. The final

6 6 part of the paper is devoted to a discussion of the main conclusions and limitations of the analysis and establishes an agenda for future research. Public agenda Public agenda refers to the set of issues to which the public attends (Jones and Baumgartner 2005:251). It measures the issues that are salient to the general public and reflect what is on the mind of the country or the most important problem that people think about (Baumgartner and Jones 2001: 192). In order to assess the public agenda we rely on data collected by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas that reports citizens views on the most important problem (MIP) facing the nation. To avoid problems related to the variability in question wording, we have coded the answers to the question: What is, in your opinion, the most important problem that actually exists in Spain? And the second? And the third? from 1994 to 2007 (before 1993 the wording and format of the survey changed dramatically). This is an open, multi-answer question that provides information about issue priorization, but not on citizen s policy positions or preferences for solutions. It s also worth to mention that to limit the number of responses to three may restrict public agenda capacity since each respondent, when asked, has to make a selection and rank the issues according to what considers more important in very different political, social and economic contexts. This may result in that public agenda is more focused than other agendas, because demanding a response on the single most important problem when problems are few and minor and when they are numerous and intense always yields a ranking, but these may not be equivalent (Jones and Baumgartner 2005). Coding MIP survey responses give us the opportunity to systematically compare changing public issue concerns with changing attention in different policymaking channels. To translate CIS polls into issue attention percentages we took three steps. First we coded each answer according to the Policy Agendas Project methodology developed by Baumgartner, Jones and Wilkerson for the United States (Baumgartner and Jones 1993, Jones and Baumgartner 2005) This is, each answer was coded according to a universal coding system based on 19 major topic categories (table 1). Each of these categories is further divided into more detailed 247 subtopics 3. Second, we calculated for each poll the 3 This coding system has been adapted to the characteristics of the Spanish political system introducing some revisions in order to take into account elements that have no equivalent in the United States. For example questions dealing with the national health

7 7 percentages for each category. And finally, we aggregated the data on an annual basis, taking the average values in those years where multiple polls were conducted (the number of polls conducted varies across years, for example the MIP question was asked three times in 1993 and ten in 2001). Figure 1 shows the policy issues prioritized by the public between 1994 and The total area of the graph represents the total public agenda space from 1994 to 2007, and each policy issue area the percentage of people that considers this issue as the most important problem facing the nation. The figure shows that economics, justice and crime, government affairs and health issues occupy a prominent place in the public agenda. If we look at figure 2 we observe that until the late nineties they represent between the 80 and the 90% of the public agenda space. In 1996, these four issues so dominate the public agenda (91%) that there was little room for public discussion of anything else. If we look at the whole period, economics represents (as average) 34.6% of the public agenda, justice and crime 25%, government affairs 8.5% and health issues 8.3 %. With the turn of the twenty-first century, new issues enter the public agenda, and areas that had traditionally been left out start to capture public attention (figure 3). In 2006, 17.2% of all responses fell into the category of rights (in 1995 represented only 0.53%). The post September 11 period (2001) and the new rights policy initiated by the socialist government in 2004 (among other the reform of the civil code to allow homosexual weddings or the beginning of a debate to reform the abortion law) open a social debate on rights issues that make them to enter public agenda. Because of the unprecedented increasing of housing prices and mortgage financial problems in Spain, housing issues also register a significant increase with the new millennium (in 2007 represented 12.8% of all responses while in 2001 were only a 1.3%). Other issues that enter the agenda include defense and international affairs (responses grew up to 3.7% in 2003 coinciding with the debate on the Spanish participation in different international conflicts, among other the Iraq war), labor issues (the second government of the Partido Popular started in 2000 with a general labor strike) and transport (0.6% of responses in 2003 coinciding with the problems originated by the high-speed train (AVE)). To sum up, between 1994 and 2007 the public agenda is dominated by few issues (mostly economics and crime and justice affairs) but different events, particularly from the beginning of the new century, have opened a policy window for new issues to enter the agenda. The question is whether political activities follow the same patterns system or the establishment of the Autonomic State For more information there is special issue in the Journal of European Public Policy (2006) about the policy agendas project ( The Spanish project web page is located at

8 8 for the last fourteen years; to what extend the prime minister in the new millennium is also giving more attention to rights, housing or international affairs while giving the annual speech, or whether parliamentary groups are responding to this public preferences while introducing orals questions or parliamentary bills. The next section is devoted to explain the evolution of the political agenda across different policymaking channels. Political agenda The political agenda is defined here as the list of issues that parliamentary and governmental actors attend across multiple policymaking channels. To measure issue priorities (or policy preferences) of parliamentary groups and the executive we have created different databases on laws (organic and ordinary laws and decree-laws), executive and parliamentary group s bills, oral questions and Prime Minister speeches. These databases include as a whole records which have been coded for the period 1977 to 2008 following the methodology of the policy agendas project, as described above for the public opinion 4. Table 2 gives information about the records for the period considered in this analysis 1994 to Attention capacity of the political agenda is not open ended (McCombs and Shaw 1977, Jones and Baumgartner 2001, Soroka 2002, Jones et al. 2009). Speeches, oral questions, bills and laws are constrained in size for several reasons. First, attention capacity is constrained by institutional rules governing parliamentary activities. Organic laws are limited to fundamental rights and public liberties, the general electoral system, and the modification of basic institutions like the Constitutional Court. By the same token, decree-laws may not affect the regulation of the basic institutions of the State, the 4 Our database goes back to Here we have only included the data from 1994 because public opinion is only available from that year. In order to fully understand the prioritization of issues by the executive and Spanish parliamentary groups we have also defined (an included in the databases) different explanatory variables which can be summarized as follows: (1) Europeanization (for example to what extend a bill is introduced for the transposition of a EU directive); (2) political decentralization (for example an oral question dealing with a conflict of competences between the central government and a Autonomous Community); (3) type of government (minority or majority government); (4) political party (in the government, introducing a bill, etc); (5) other variables related to the procedures associated to a particular indicator (type of approval of a law urgent, ordinary, etc), commission in which a bill is debated, etc).

9 9 rights, duties, and liberties of the citizens which are regulated in Title I of the Constitution, the Autonomous Communities, or the general electoral law. Besides, agenda capacity varies across these policymaking channels according to the level of institutional friction, and its position in the policy-making process. As described in more detail in the next sections, the closer it is a policy making channel to the agenda setting stage, and the lower the institutional cost for introducing a new issue, the larger the attention capacity of this institutional channel (Jones et al 2009). Table 3 summarizes agenda capacity across different policy making channels 5. In order to describe the political agenda we first consider issue competition across different policymaking channels. To do that we compute Entropy scores for speeches, oral questions, bills and laws in each year. Entropy is a measure of competition among issues that gives information about the degree of fragmentation of the political and public agenda over time 6. The higher the entropy scores the more fragmentation of the agenda. If all the attention were concentrated in just a single topic area, then entropy would be equal to zero. The maximum entropy value would be in the case where attention was evenly divided across all policy topics. As we have 19 topics, the maximum possible value of entropy in our case is 2.94 (log 19) (Brouard et al 2008). Figure 4 displays the results. Overall, the level of issue concentration is quite low, and there are not significant differences along the period with the exception of speeches. There is a tendency towards an increasing concentration of the speeches agenda during the last years of Felipe Gonzalez Socialist government, a tendency that disappears once the Partido Popular lead by Jose Maria Aznar wins the elections in 1996 (Chaqués et al. 2008). A comparison among policymaking activities illustrates that political attention is specially dispersed in the oral questions (entropy 2.73), followed by 5 In general, attention capacity in legislative activities has increased for the last years because improvements in parliamentary resources like personnel, policy advice and access to electronic information systems; increasing division of labour among committees which allows to process an increasing number of legislative proposals simultaneously, and also by increasing the degree of professionalization (Becker and Saalfeld 2004: 59) 6 Formally, entropy (H) is defined as H=Σ[p(xi) log(p(xi))] Σ[p(xi) log(p(xi))] where xi represents an issue, and p(xi) is the proportion of total attention the issue receives in a given time period.

10 10 laws (2.43), parliamentary bills (2.40), executive bills (2.35) and speeches (2.27) with a moderate dispersion across issues. Another question is which issues are concentrating most of the attention in each policymaking channel. Figures 5 to 10 gives information about the percentage of attention given to each topic in different policy venues from 1994 to First, there are some issues that always capture most of the political agendas attention. Economic issues, labor, crime, foreign affairs and government capture most of the attention in all the policymaking channels, with some exceptions in the case of Parliamentary bills. Parliamentary groups do not give much attention to foreign affairs (only 1, 3%) or economics (4,8%), and focus more on rights related issues (9.9%), education (7,4%) or social policy (8,4%). Second, there are some issues that never capture much attention like energy, environment, housing, research and development, foreign trade, social policy and transport issues. Again there are two important exceptions: more than 8% of the oral questions presented for the last fourteen years are devoted to transport issues, and 8,4% of parliamentary bills deal with social policy issues 7. Besides, three of these issues foreign trade, energy and research and development are never mentioned as important by public opinion, which could be seen as an indicator of their lack of visibility. Third, there are some issues in the political agenda that are object of increasing attention across time (new issues). Figures 11 to 16 show for each policymaking channel the percentage change (positive or negative) of issue attention corresponding to each of the 19 issue areas. To do that, we have compared the percentage of attention devoted to each issue in the period with the percentage of attention devoted to the same issue in the new millennium (period ). A correlation analysis between percentage changes by issue and policymaking channels (table 4) shows that there is a positive and significant correlation (0.817) between issues that enter and leave the public agenda (MIP) and the governmental agenda (speeches). Issues like rights, labor, education, transport, crime and law, and housing are increasingly perceived by public opinion as the most important problem facing the nation, and are also increasingly mentioned by Prime Minister in annual speeches. 7 These results could be bias by the way we have constructed the database. This is we are comparing the percentage of attention to big issues like Economics to other issues like housing which are much more specific. One way to solvent this is to look at the subcode level. Further analysis will be done in this direction.

11 11 In contrast, issues like economics and government affairs are increasingly leaving both, the public and the governmental agenda (spechees). The case of economics is particularly interesting because all other policymaking channels (laws, executive and parliamentary bills and oral questions) show an increasing attention to them. Other issue areas show a similar correspondence trend between MIP and speeches on the one hand, and the rest of policy making channels on the other. Commerce issues are receiving an increasing attention in all policymaking channels with the exception of speeches and MIP. Transport in contrast, is receiving increasing attention in speeches and MIP but is leaving the agenda in almost all the other policymaking channels. The correlation between MIP and speeches in most issues shows the correspondence on issue prioritization between two highly visible and connected venues. There is also a significant and positive correlation (0.759) between issues that enter and leave the agenda in laws and executive bills. This is an expected correlation since an important percentage of laws (87%) come from executive bills 8. The next sections are aimed to analyze to what extent the issues identified as the most important by the public are also capturing the attention of politicians and members of the executive, and whether different types of institutions within the political system are more or less responsive than other. From here we could analyze its consequences in terms of democratic governance. Correspondence matrix In order to analyze whether the issues that are the focus of policymaking activity are also the top priorities of the public, we construct a non-symmetrical correspondence matrix following Jones et al. (2009). The correspondence matrix is the matrix of correlations formed from the priorities-by-time and the activities-by-time matrices for any one policymaking channel. In the priorities-by-time matrix each column is a Most Important Problem topic (15 in total) 9 and each row is a year. Each cell entry indicates the percentage of the public that considers this topic to be the most important problem 8 Here we only consider organic and ordinary laws, excluding decree laws, and legislative decrees. 9 Four issues included in the policy agendas codes (commerce, energy, science and technology and foreign trade) are never mentioned by respondents as the most important problem facing the nation.

12 12 facing the nation. In the activities-by-time matrix each entry shows the percentage of activity in a policy channel that is devoted to each one of these 15 issues in a given year (14 in total). Estimating the correlation between the priorities-by-time and the activitiesby-time matrix we obtain the correspondence matrix where each entry in the matrix shows the correlation between the proportion of all MIP responses dedicated to one issue with the proportion of total activity in a policy channel devoted to the same issue over the 14 years (14 annual observations). The correspondence matrices (tables 5 to 11) show the correlations between MIP and each policymaking channel for the period We observe that Prime Minister Speeches, Oral Questions and Decree-Laws are the policymaking channels that more strongly correlate with the priorities of the public. Speeches and MIP are strongly correlated (with statistically significant correlations) with economics, rights, labor, transport, housing and government affairs. Oral Questions are strongly correlated with rights, health, housing, defense and international affairs, and Decree-Laws with agriculture, government affairs and public lands. The correlations are weaker in the other policymaking channels, particularly with regards to organic laws and parliamentary groups bills (no statistically significant correlation), and ordinary laws and governmental bills (only one significant correlation in the issue area of rights). The next section of the paper analyzes in details to what extent differences in the representation of public opinion preferences vary across policymaking channel and its relation to institutional friction. Political agendas and institutional friction In order to measure institutional friction we consider different kinds of costs that decisionmaking systems impose. We have ranked institutions and grouped them into five categories according to the extend they impose decision and transaction costs -costs required to come to an acceptable agreement, including bargaining and institutionally imposed costs on policymaking activities 10 (table 12 and table 13). As table 12 illustrates institutional costs increase as a proposal moves through the policy stages (from very high for organic laws to very low for speeches). This is, institutional friction increases from agenda-setting actions (actions that 10 Decision and transaction costs are rules and institutional arrangements associated to bills, laws, oral questions and speeches, defined by The Spanish Constitution, and statutes of the Congreso de los Diputados and the Senate.

13 13 influence which issues will be formally considered by the government and policy makers) to decision-making actions (formal decisions). The closer is an action to the input stream and the more it focuses on monitoring and reporting relevant social indicators (like speeches or oral questions), the higher the correspondence with public concerns (Jones and Baumgartner 2005:171). The ranking presented in table 12 also illustrates the relevance of institutional veto players for explaining institutional friction (Tsebelis 1995:301). Decision and transaction cost increase as the number of individuals or collective actors whose agreement is required for a change in policy increases. Following the agenda setting methodology, we have also estimated kurtosis as a measure of resistance to change. The basic idea is that the higher kurtosis score the less frequent are shifts in issue attention. Accordingly we should expect a higher kurtosis for those policy making channels with higher institutional friction like laws. We have measured kurtosis for the period under study in this paper ( ) and the whole democratic period ( ). The results summarized in table 13 do not corroborate this assumption about kurtosis especially for the case of oral questions in which kurtosis is really high (we do not have an explanation for these variations yet). Speeches have the lowest level of institutional friction, and the highest level of visibility among the policy making channels. They are one of the most visible political moments of the year. What the Prime Minister says is reported by the media and watched and debated by the public and their representatives. In these respects it is an important agenda setting event. It is the President s opportunity to define or frame what the government has done and what the president hopes it will do, in ways that advance his personal goals. As an elected official, it is also an opportunity to demonstrate concern for the issues that concern the public. The costs of shifting speech attention to a new issue or devoting more or less attention to a given issue from one speech to the next should be relatively low compared to other types of activity. If the President wants to shift attention to a new issue, she does not need the consent of other political actors as is required (for example) to pass a law. Besides, there is not a defined limitation in the length of the speech For a comparative analysis about issue attention and speeches following the policy agendas project see (Chaques, Palau, Muñoz and Wilkerson 2008) or the special issue The Comparative Agendas Project: a new perspective for comparative politics, Revue International de Politique Comparée (forthcoming).

14 14 Parliamentary control activities are policymaking channels with a low level of institutional friction 12. In this analysis we have only considered oral questions introduced in plenary meetings. The introduction of an oral question is a quite open process in which a single deputy or a parliamentary group can get involved, with only few institutional veto points (eg. it is the president of the chamber with the agreement of the Junta de Portavoces who decides the number of oral questions that will be presented in each session). Oral questions are especially interesting for the analysis of political responsiveness mainly because they are defined as an instrument for supervising the implementation of policy decisions by the executive or/and the response given by the executive to general problems and crisis situations. Oral questions, as the bills introduced by parliamentary groups, could also be seen as reactive devices used by political parties for disestablishing the executive. Parliamentary groups introduce bills that have no chance to go through the legislative process as an attention- seeking strategy. Bills are not actual-final policy decisions, but they give relevant information about the direction of polity and legislative priorities of the executive and parliamentary groups that go beyond symbolic discussions about policy issues. In the case of Spain a bill introduction is also a relatively quite open process in which several policy actors can participate the executive, parliamentary groups of any of the chambers, the general population, and regional authorities (Comunidades Autónomas). Institutional costs veto points, areas of friction are low in relation to other legislative activities (laws), although there are some important differences between executive bills and the rest. First, executive bills are prioritized upon any other bill introduced during the same parliamentary period; second, the chances to pass an executive bill are higher. Finally, laws (and budgets) are the basic indicator to measure prioritization of issues in a particular polity. They give information about actual final decisions. But the level of institutional friction and veto points is higher than the rest. Here we have also considered the differences between three types of laws with different levels of institutional friction. Institutional costs are especially high for Organic laws mainly because require the overall majority of the Members of Congress in a final vote on the bill as a whole to be passed (article 81 of the Constitution). By the contrary, institutional 12 There is an important and growing set of literature about parliamentary behaviour in a comparative perspective like WC Muller, K Strom (1999) or Doring and Hallerberg (2004).

15 15 costs are moderate for decree-laws mainly because they follow a special legislative process lead by the executive 13. To analyze whether representation of public priorities is related to institutional friction we extract the main diagonal from tables 5 to 11 and produce a new table that shows the number of significant correlations for every policymaking channel and the average correlations (table 12). We observe that, as predicted by the institutional friction hypothesis, those policymaking channels associated with a higher friction show a low level of correspondence with public priorities than those associated with a low institutional friction. Organic laws have the lower average correlation (0.009) and have no significant correlation with any of the topics analyzed. As we move from high to lower levels of friction we observe that the significant and the average correlations increase: ordinary laws have a average correlation (and 1 issue statistically significant), parliamentary groups bills (and 0 issues statistically significant), governmental bills (1 issue statistically significant), Decrees-Laws (3 issues statistically significant), oral questions (5 issues statistically significant) and speeches (6 issues statistically significant). Figure 17 shows the same information organized in a graph. Each bar shows the average correlation across issue areas in the different policymaking channels. As Jones et al. (2009) argue for the US case, these results indicate that policymaking channels with higher levels of friction have a lower relationship with public priorities. Data on the scatter plot (figure 18) corroborates that as institutional costs increase the average correspondence coefficient between public preferences and policymaking activities across different policy areas decreases. Finally table 12 also gives information about whether correspondence between public preferences and political activities is related to political decentralization. We 13 Section 86 of the Constitution states that In case of extraordinary and urgent need, the Government may issue temporary legislative provisions which shall take the form of decree-laws and which may not affect the legal system of the basic State institutions, the rights, duties and freedoms of the citizens contained in Part 1, the system of Selfgoverning Communities, or the general electoral law. Decree-laws must be inmediately submitted for debate and voting by the entire Congress, which must be summoned for this purpose if not already in session, within thirty days of their promulgation. The Congress shall adopt an specific decision on their ratification or repeal in the said period, for which purpose the Standing Orders shall contemplate a special summary procedure.

16 16 depart from the idea that the higher the level of political decentralization of a policy issue, the less correspondence between public opinion and parliamentary activities at the national level. This is, parliamentary and governmental actors at the national level are less responsive to public opinion for those issues of regional or local jurisdiction like housing for example. The first column in table 12 illustrates the level of political decentralization: issues like defense or foreign affairs are exclusively regulated by the central government; issues like housing are politically decentralized towards regional and local authorities, while issues like health, education, or the environment are issues with shared jurisdiction the central government enacts basic laws and the Comunidades Autónomas have the capacity to enact laws and/or define implementation rules. At this point the data shows that for those issues monopolized by the central government we find, as expected, a higher level of correspondence at the decision making stage (for example rights issues). For issues like defense, or international affairs the low level of correspondence at the decision making stage (laws and bills) could be explained by the fact that they are rarely considered by public opinion as the most important problem, but also because in both cases policy decisions are often driven by governing obligations. Finally, as expected, for those issues with shared jurisdiction between the central and the regional government there is a low level of correspondence at the decision making stage. This is specially the case for housing issues. Correspondence between public preferences and political actions is high and significant in the agenda setting stages like speeches or oral questions. Both the executive and parliamentary groups are giving attention to housing in order to demonstrate concern for the issues prioritized by the public. But only few decisions are taken at the national level mainly because housing is an issue under the jurisdiction of regional governments. Something similar occurs for health issues correlation is high and significant for oral questions. Discussion In this paper we have assessed to what extend public preferences have been represented across different policy making channels speeches, oral questions, executive and parliamentary groups bills, and laws (decree laws, ordinary and organic laws) from 1994 to Our goal was to

17 17 make a contribution to the analysis of political representation and to test the relevance of institutional friction as an explanatory variable about the correspondence between public preferences and political activities. We find that (1) public priorities tend to be better represented where institutional friction is lower and (2) correspondence between public preferences and political activities is higher at the agenda setting stage than at the decision making stage. Those policymaking channels associated with lower institutional costs like speeches and oral questions, are more responsive to citizen s preferences than those associated with higher institutional costs like laws. These results are consistent with the existing literature on institutional friction (Jones and Baumgartner 2005) and particularly with the analysis developed by Jones et al. (2009) for the US case. Decision and transaction costs are an important variable for explaining the lack of correspondence at decision-making policy stages. They reduce the chances of sudden policy changes and thus the capacity of rapid responses of political parties to public preferences. In relation to this, one of the most striking results of this analysis is the low level of correspondence of parliamentary bills and public preferences, despite its moderate level of institutional friction. This is particularly interesting if we consider that parliamentary bills share important features with oral questions, which in contrast show a much higher level of correspondence than parliamentary group bill. Both initiatives could be partly seen as reactive devices used by parliamentary groups to seek the attention of the public, the media and political actors upon issues that potentially could disestablish the executive, but their degree of correspondence to public opinion is quite different. Further analysis should be made in order to explain these differences across policy making channels that complement the institutional friction hypothesis. Parliamentary groups not only respond to public preferences, but also to other factors. This question should be further explored in order to determine the relevance of these other factors like party politics, interest groups or the media influence for explaining issue attention in parliamentary bills or oral questions for example. Besides, further analysis should be made in order to explain the different levels of correspondence between different parliamentary groups and public opinion to what extend some issues are directly associated to specific parliamentary groups; or whether parliamentary bills presented by nationalist political parties are more motivated by centralregional politics dynamics than citizen s preferences. In relation to this, table 14 and figure 19 gives information about the correspondence between party preferences and public opinion for oral questions. The analysis of correlations illustrate that national parties are more responsive to public preferences than regional-nationalist parties. This is specially the case of PSOE (the highest average correlation). Regional-nationalist parties are less responsive to

18 18 public preferences and this is specially the case for the PNV (nationalist-conservative Basc party) with a negative average correlation. Another question that must be addressed in future research is to what extent changes in responsiveness are associated with electoral periods. Does responsiveness increase with the proximity of elections? Which policymaking channels are more sensible to electoral periods? Existing research indicates that electoral competition often mandates responsiveness to the public (Burstein 2003:31). Finally, it is important to take into account that correlations give information about whether public and policy preferences are coincident but does not tell us if this relationship is causal. One of the open questions in the literature analyzing democratic responsiveness is to determine if causal impact proceeds from public opinion to policy or if it is the other way about (Page 1994: 25). Does public opinion exert a powerful influence on government action or does it simply react to what policymakers come up with? There is a third force, for example a salient event or a crisis situations, media attention, interest groups or partisan politics driving both public opinion and policy makers preferences? An increasing distance between public opinion and political action along the last decades could also be directly related to the increasing delegation of political power towards supranational and subnational political institutions like the European Union and the Comunidades Autónomas (1999). By the same token, the relationship between public preferences and policy actions is not necessary a unilateral relationship in which politicians follow citizen s opinions. It could also be interpreted as a direct influence of politicians willing to educate, or manipulate public opinion (Page and Shapiro 1983:175, Page 1994:25). The question about how much of the observed relationship is causal rather than spurious, or/and how much causal impact proceeds from opinion to policy rather than the reserve, or/and if there are third factors that mediate this relationship is still an open question in the analysis of democratic responsiveness. REFERENCES Bartels, L. M Constituency Opinion and Congressional Policy Making: The Reagan Defense Build Up. The American Political Science Review, 85 (2):

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