Rice political scientist wins NSF CAREER grant to study policy-public opinion link

Rice political scientist wins NSF CAREER grant to study policy-public opinion link

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News Staff

Is policymaking in multiparty democracies responsive to citizen preferences during the government’s term in office?

Lanny Martin, assistant professor of political science, hopes to answer that question through research he will conduct with his National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant.

LANNY MARTIN

While it may seem to be self-evident that democratically elected governments would pay heed to the public mood, Martin said that in some cases, that doesn’t hold. “In most democracies, there is no majority party — so governments are built on coalitions,” he said. “Since many smaller parties must appeal to their bases, they have incentives to not reflect majority opinion.”

A good deal of scholarship has looked at this relationship between government policy and public opinion as it has played out in the United States, where small political parties are virtually irrelevant. Martin’s research, on the other hand, focuses on parliamentary systems in Europe, many of which feature prominent roles for small parties.

With the NSF grant, Martin will go to Europe next summer, along with two graduate students, to search the archives for legislative data on all changes to economic policy (specifically, tax and welfare issues) that have been proposed and enacted over the past 10 to 20 years. The team will be working in collaboration with students from universities in Europe who are also engaged in legislative research. The project will eventually cover seven European countries over the next four summers.

The countries and the dates of legislation to be studied are Austria (1994-2006), Belgium (1985-2007), Denmark (1982-2005), Germany (1983-2005), Luxembourg (1989-2004), the Netherlands (1981-2006) and Sweden (1994-2006).

When he’s finished, Martin hopes to have created the largest cross-national legislative dataset of its kind. Such data are crucial to the project’s goal of comparing policies to swings in public opinion. Martin’s thesis is that “the degree to which a government party is ‘responsive’ to the preferences of its target constituency depends on the proximity of elections, the divisions between the party and its parliamentary allies and the likelihood that the party might lose its position in the government.”
Martin is one of only five scholars in the United States who have received an NSF CAREER grant from the political science program. The CAREER program is designed to support “the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization,” according to the NSF Web site.
In addition to collecting legislative data, Martin plans to teach an annual practicum course in legislative research for graduate and undergraduate students. He will also host weeklong workshops that bring students at Rice together with students from across the U.S. and Europe who are working on similar questions in comparative legislative research.

“I’m very excited about the opportunity to contribute to our understanding of these fundamental questions in the study of democratic representation,” Martin said. “I’m equally excited about the opportunity to work closely with Rice graduate and undergraduate students as they develop their own research ideas in this area.”

While Martin is the only Rice political scientist to receive the CAREER grant, three other members of the department received four separate NSF grants: Associate Professor Randolph Stevenson is the primary investigator for “Political Context and Political Knowledge in Modern Democracies,” Assistant Professor Royce Carroll is the primary investigator for “Collaborative Research on How Nominations Affect Government Formation” and Associate Professor John Alford is the primary investigator for two collaborative research projects, ”Genes and Politics: Providing the Necessary Data” and “Investigating the Genetic Basis of Economic Behavior.”

In addition, Robert Stein, the Lena Gohlman Fox professor of political science, will collaborate with Devika Subramanian, professor of computer science, and Leonardo Dueñas-Osorio, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, on a project titled “Independent Response of Complex Urban Infrastructures Subjected to Multiple Hazards.”