Policymakers’ Responsiveness to Public Priorities. A Survey-Embedded Experiment with Politicians in Belgium, Canada and Israel

Are policymakers responsive to public priorities? This question is difficult to answer, not only because it is hard to establish proof of a causal relationship between public opinion and political attention. It also requires an assessment of politicians’ perception of public opinion, which is what ultimately drives their behavior. Such evidence is hard to obtain. This paper solves the latter problem by considering media coverage as a proxy that politicians use to be informed about public priorities. Some politicians see the media as a reflection—a ‘surrogate’—of public opinion (Pritchard, 1994). Others believe that the inverse is true: that the media, by prioritizing some issues and ignoring others, affect the public opinion (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). Either way, there is ample evidence that politicians perceive media coverage to be linked to public opinion somehow (Herbst, 1998). In fact, the booming literature that investigates the media’s agenda-effect on policymakers’ priorities draws on the underlying assumption that these media effects are in fact public opinion effects (Walgrave & Van Aelst, 2006). By means of a survey-embedded experiment with Belgian, Canadian and Israeli political elites (N = 395), this paper tests whether the fact that an issue is covered by the news media—which implies that the public deems the issue to be important—causes politicians to pay attention to this issue. It shows that a piece of information gets more attention from politicians when it comes via the media as opposed to an identical piece of information coming via a personal e-mail. Political elites display thus responsiveness vis-à-vis public preferences. The paper additionally explores how individual policymakers, from different countries, vary in their inclination to be responsive to public (media) priorities.