Democratic responsiveness to different forms of public opinion

Most research on public opinion and responsiveness has focused on mass opinion polls. However, we also know that there are many other ways of measuring public opinion, and other ways elites listen to public opinion. This paper will explore a new method and data for the study of public opinion and responsiveness, namely letters from members of the public to the Prime Minister. While we have long understood democracy as requiring responsiveness, the main empirical approaches to responsiveness has been restricted to one narrow definition of public opinion - mass opinion polls. To better understand responsiveness, we need to compare and understand different forms of public opinion. This paper analyses the topics of letters from the public to the Prime Minister and considers if they reflect 'mass’ public opinion and whether government is responsive to the topic of the letters. This is examined through a new dataset of 400,000 letters from the public to Australian Prime Minister John Howard, coded against the Australian Policy Agendas Project Codebook, on a fortnightly basis, across a 5 year period. The paper finds very different patterns in the subjects of letters, compared to opinion polls, with letters mainly being driven by major external events (such as the Port Arthur massacre, the Wik High Court decision and the atrocities in East Timor), rather than those issues that usually top opinion polls (economy, health, education). The paper also shows that there is no evidence of responsiveness in the political agenda (as measured by the topics of Mr Howard’s speeches) to the topics of the letters.