This paper investigates whether incentives coming from electoral competition have an impact on government responsiveness to citizens’ priorities. Two incentives are considered particularly relevant for responsiveness: the first occurring at the election time is related to the differentiation of the political offer; the second occurs between elections and is related to the government’s electoral vulnerability. Two main hypotheses derive: (a) the more differentiated the political offer and (b) the more vulnerable the government, the higher the probability of responsiveness, depending on the policy domain. While different stages of government responsiveness exist, this paper focuses on rhetorical responsiveness, that is, when a shift of citizens’ priorities (captured by the ‘most important problem/issue’ question) leads to a shift of salience in the executive speeches (using data from the Comparative Agendas Project) in the same direction. To study how competition might affect this relationship, a time-series cross-section analysis is implemented.
