This book has argued that public opinion is the dominant influence on policy making in the American states. In this concluding chapter, we summarize our evidence for strong democratic representation in the states, place our findings in the context of the behavioral literature on democratic politics, and discuss the implications for the understanding of representative democracy.

Our story depends on the distillation of policy questions to a single dimension of ideology, what is commonly called liberalism-conservatism. Ideology – whether one dimension or many – does not neatly account for all government policies or all public preferences or even keep its precise meaning from one decade to the next. But the simplification of policy to one ideological dimension provides powerful leverage for understanding the ideological connection between public preferences and government policy in the U.S. states. Representation in the states works not necessarily in terms of government compliance with specific public demands (although this assertion is largely untested) but rather in terms of public opinion controlling the general ideological direction of state policy.

Our project was set in motion by the availability of state-level samples of ideological preference. Aggregation of opinion from the CBS/NYT surveys provided plausible scores for the states in terms of ideological identification plus the important variable of party identification. Given the sample sizes, these measures are highly reliable from a statistical standpoint. Moreover, for the 1976-88 period for which we collected state opinion data, the ideological orderings of state electorates appear extremely stable. States moved around only slightly on the scale of relative Democratic versus Republican partisanship and hardly at all on ideology.