Policies backed by over half the public still mostly fail to pass

Evidence

Research on the opinion-­policy link has indeed observed a status quo bias: policy change becomes more likely when larger shares of the public want change, but not to the extent warranted by public support alone. For instance, in Martin Gilens’ (2012) study, policy proposals supported by 50%–60% of the population were only implemented about 30% of the time. But the effects of this status quo bias on inequality in responsiveness was not explored in depth in this study. — Mikael Persson and Anders Sundell, Blocking the Poor, 99

Categorization

• XREF: Ties directly to Gilens and Bartels-era work on unequal political responsiveness that the reader may already track, and adds the untested inequality angle. — connects to: Large public majorities favoring policy change lose most of the time. — Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics:…, 106