Elites’ Knowledge of the Public’s Issue Priorities. The Accuracy of Policy Makers’ Assessment of what the Public Cares about in Three Countries

For public policies to be in line with public opinion, policy makers need to be aware of the priorities and preferences of the public. This study looks at the accurateness of political decision makers’ knowledge of the public’s priorities. Agenda-setting research has showed that public and political attention is scarce, and that political attention is a prerequisite for any sort of substantial policy change. Policy making is not only a matter of positional preferences but also, and maybe even more, a matter of prioritizing some issues and problems above others. To study to what extent political decision-makers know what the public thinks to be important, we depart from an information-processing perspective. The public’s agenda is not directly observable but rather opaque. Extant work has showed that elites use several sources of information to gauge public opinion: opinion polls, direct contact with constituents, mass media etc. Studying individual elites, we investigate which elites are better in estimating the public’s priorities. Our general hypothesis is that elites’ knowledge of the public’s priorities varies with how they process societal information. Depending on their preferred sources of information, the things they look at in incoming societal signals, their information selection strategies etc. their assessment of what the public cares about is more or less accurate, we expect. The data come from the INFOPOL-project (ERC grant), a comparative study of individual elites and citizens in Belgium, Canada in Israel. In 2015, in total 409 party leaders, ministers and (mostly) members of parliament (MPs) have been surveyed about their information-processing strategies and about their estimation of the public’s priorities. At the same time, we interviewed random samples of citizens asking them about their general issue and specific problem priorities. These data allow to calculate the accuracy of elites’ estimation of the public’s preferences.