Are We Measuring Policy Responsiveness Correctly?

In recent decades a growing body of literature has sought to analyse the responsiveness of elected governments to public opinion. The majority of studies which have looked at responsiveness in terms of policy congruence, issue attention or public mood have concluded that elected governments are broadly responsive to the views of their public (e.g. Erikson et al, 2002; Soroka and Wleizen, 2005; Rasmussen et al, 2018). This paper challenges the assumptions underlying measuring responsiveness through quantitative methods. It uses real world examples to demonstrate that existing methods would categorise the same decision differently in terms of whether or not it was responding to public opinion. I argue that if studies of responsiveness are seeking to measure the existence and extent of governments’ ‘rational anticipation’ (Stimson et al, 1995) of future electoral censure, qualitative examination of decision-making processes and elite views are necessary to understand how parties in office respond to electoral incentives through their positioning and prioritisation.