Public vs. Policy Responsiveness: The Case of Public Salience in Health Reforms

• In Event: Welfare State Support in Times of Crisis

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the dynamic relationship between governmental legislative activity and public issue salience. While much of the literature on policy responsiveness takes public opinion as its point of departure and moves on to study the consequent reactions of parties and governments, we question the assumption that public opinion is the leading driver of governmental activity. Instead, we argue that the public solely responds to political debates surrounding new legislation and shifts their attention to issues already on the government’s agenda. When legislation is implemented the public attention on the issue is expected to decline. We rely on a novel dataset of healthcare legislation from 2002 to 2017 in 36 European countries to analyze the precise timing of changes in public opinion and governmental activity. We find that the public issue salience of health increases during the period in which governments prepare health legislation and then declines after the law implementation. When we examine whether conversely increases in health salience can predict health legislation, we find no statistically significant effect. Consequently, we argue that governmental legislative activity provokes an issue salience pattern similar to Anthony Downs’ ‘issue attention cycle’ and the public opinion is not a driver of policy reforms.

Authors

• Diana Elena Burlacu, Newcastle University

• Ellen M. Immergut, European University Institute