Russia Today reports on a study from Princeton and Northwestern Universities on the relationship between majority views and policy in the United States and arrives at an interesting finding:
While “Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association,” the authors say the data implicate “the nearly total failure of ‘median voter’ and other Majoritarian Electoral Democracy theories [of America]. When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
As will certainly be pointed out, we don’t have a democracy and weren’t intended to have a democracy. At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin is said to have been buttonholed by a passerby who asked him what form of government the convention had produced. “A republic if you can keep it” he is said to have replied.
Even in a representative democracy I would expect majority opinion to have more than a “near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy”. However, the finding does go some way towards explaining our immigration laws, trade laws, agricultural policy, and foreign policy. There is broad consensus in many areas of public policy that’s dramatically different from the policy that’s being followed.