The objective of this research is to observe whether or not there exists the cyclical relationship between public preferences and government responsiveness. Most related studies pursue only to test one way causal relationship between two concepts: th...
The objective of this research is to observe whether or not there exists the cyclical relationship between public preferences and government responsiveness. Most related studies pursue only to test one way causal relationship between two concepts: the effect of public preferences on government responsiveness. This study, however, focuses on the mutual causal relations between two concepts with time lags, so called as a cyclical causal relationship. Most studies in the related literature deal with the case of the United States. Moreover, there exist few empirical studies in the welfare literature to examine the causality except for Brooks & Manza’s studies which explore only one way causality.
The study investigates the cyclical causal relationship between public welfare preferences and government responsiveness in fourteen OECD countries during the period of 1985-2006. With several control variables the research finds the cyclical causal relationship between two variables: The higher public welfare preference is, the more government responsiveness and in consecutive order much government responsiveness results in lower public welfare preferences than the past ones with a certain time lag.