Representation, agendas and institutions

Abstract

Dynamic agenda representation can be understood through the transmission of the priorities of the public onto the policy priorities of government. The pattern of representation in policy agendas is mediated through institutions due to friction (i.e., organisational and cognitive costs imposed on change) in decision making and variation in the scarcity of policy makers' attention. This article builds on extant studies of the correspondence between public priorities and the policy activities of government, undertaking time‐series analyses using data for the United States and the United Kingdom, from 1951 to 2003, relating to executive speeches, laws and budgets in combination with data on public opinion about the ‘most important problem’. The results show that the responsiveness of policy agendas to public priorities is greater when institutions are subject to less friction (i.e., executive speeches subject to few formal rules and involving a limited number of actors) and declines as friction against policy change increases (i.e., laws and budgets subject to a greater number of veto points and political interests/coalitions).

Responsive elections: The effect of public opinion on political campaigns

“…Like in previous work our expectation is that campaigns are capable of responding to short term shocks as well as long term trends in public priorities and opponent campaigns separately and the use of ECMs allows us to test for these separate effects (Bevan and Jennings 2014;Jennings and John 2009). Our basic model can be represented in the form: ΔCampaignt = α0* + α1*Campaignt-1 + β0*ΔOPINIONt + β1*OPINIONt-1 + εt…”

“…However, as we note earlier in this paper it is common for responsiveness to vary by issue, sometimes in fairly random ways (Page andShapiro 1983, Bevan andJennings 2014). While this does make the parties unresponsive to these two issues then, it does not necessarily mean the parties are simply unresponsive to public opinion in general.…”

“…Building on the work of Klüver and Spoon (2014) we assume that parties not only compete with each other by altering their policy positions, but also respond to the policy priorities of voters like other political institutions (e.g. Bevan and Jennings 2014). While the party's own manifestos are one clear guide for the campaign agenda, it is all but impossible to fully and accurately attend to all the issues contained in a manifesto through the course of a campaign.…”

“…Furthermore, the data has been recoded to match the content coding system of the German Policy Agendas Project and the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) to facilitate the comparison of our analyses with recent work on opinion responsiveness to public priorities in other institutional settings (e.g. Jones et al 2009, Bevan andJennings 2014).…”

“…Its importance to understanding politics cannot be understated though, not only should the degree of responsiveness help explain the effectiveness of campaigns, but the degree of responsiveness to public priorities speaks to representation at a far earlier stage of the political process than how it is normally considered through thermostatic (Wlezien 1995;Soroka and Wlezien 2005) and other models of opinion responsiveness (Jones et al 2009;Bevan and Jennings 2014). We ask how responsive are election campaigns to public priorities?…”