Same but Different: Varying Measures of Issue Salience and their Consequences for Empirical Political Research

It is widely acknowledged that governments in most modern representative democracies are under pressure to be responsive to public opinion. When it comes to responding to public opinion, governments are generally said to pay more attention to public support on salient issues where their behavior is more likely to have an electoral impact. However, in spite of the increased use of issue salience by political science research, the ways the concept is employed and measured vary substantially. Some scholars argued that instead of asking people about the most important problem, a better salience measure might ask people what problems they think the government ought to be focusing on. In this paper, we aim to get a deeper understanding of the properties of different measures of issue salience and their volatility over time by drawing on different measures of salience and public opinion data from Germany between 2013-2021. We are asking a threefold research question: 1) when and why do topics become salient? 2) How do different salience indicators relate to each other? 3)And should we use different salience indicators for different policy issues? Our results underline that certain policy issues, such as foreign policy, vary substantially depending on whether we ask respondents about the most important issue for their country or about the most important problem for them personally. Overall, our study makes an important contribution to public opinion and responsiveness studies by showing that especially certain democratic governments dispose of more fine-grained measures of issue salience and that they may lead to different results as more traditional indicators of salience as well as to different forms of responsiveness as governments may be responsive to issues of high problem status but less to issues of top policy reform importance.