The Public Agenda

2019 ◽  
pp. 219-242
Author(s):  
Shaun Bevan ◽  
Will Jennings
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Survey Question ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Public Agenda

This chapter considers the question of what shapes the public agenda and how, in turn, the public agenda influences public policy. It introduces the survey question about the most important problem as a measure of the public agenda—comparing evidence on the policy issues attended to by publics in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain, and also the degree to which public opinion itself is subject to “punctuations.” The analysis shows how the public agenda reflects both the problem status and level of media coverage of certain issues (specifically crime and the economy). Lastly, it presents evidence on the correspondence between the priorities of citizens and those of policymakers.

Public opinion and public policy in the United States

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saundra K. Schneider ◽  
William G. Jacoby
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
The United States ◽  
Aggregate Level ◽  
The Public ◽  
Democratic Responsiveness ◽  
Policy Attitudes ◽  
Policy Field ◽  
The Relationship

In a properly-functioning democracy, public opinion should not only be correlated with, but also a major determinant of, public policy. Is that the case in the United States? In this chapter, we address that question by covering the major lines of empirical research on the relationship between American public opinion and public policy. We begin with early work that emphasized the limits of popular thinking about government, creating the apparent need for democratic elitism in governmental action. More recent literature includes perspectives from the public policy field, and research on democratic responsiveness at both the national and state levels. Major lines of work emphasize the existence of rational public opinion at the aggregate level which ‘smooths out’ the inconsistencies that may exist within individual policy attitudes. Seminal studies have considered both the degree of correspondence between opinion and policy (i.e., ‘the rational public’), and models that specify how policy responds to opinion (thermostatic responses and the macropolity). Recent methodological innovations have led to new insights about democratic responsiveness in the American states. Our general conclusion is cautiously optimistic: Policy generally does follow the contours of citizen preference, but elites also have opportunities to shape manifestations of public opinion.

Public Opinion and Morality Policy: Lessons from Canada and the United States

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mildred A. Schwartz ◽  
Raymond Tatalovich
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Morality Policy ◽  
The Public

Abstract To clarify why research examining the responsiveness of governments to public opinion produces mixed results, the authors focus on issues involving contested moral values that are known to be highly salient to the public and hence more likely to be linked to public policy. Canada and the United States, where the same issues have emerged, allow them to isolate the factors resulting in majoritarian congruence, where policies follow public opinion. The authors attribute finding even less congruence than previous research to the dominance of the courts in ruling on morality issues, although they also find a greater role for the legislature in Canada. The authors raise the possibility that the very salience of the issues inhibited political action from conflict-avoidant politicians.

scholarly journals Policy Responsiveness to Public Opinion

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert S. Erikson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
The United States ◽  
Causal Chain ◽  
Causal Mechanism ◽  
Policy Responsiveness ◽  
The Public ◽  
Policy Representation ◽  
Advanced Democracies

Policy responsiveness is a goal of democratic government—that government action responds to the preferences of its citizens. It is conceptually distinct from “representation,” whereby government actions mirror the preferences of public opinion. Governments can be representative without a direct responsiveness causal mechanism. Policy can respond to public opinion but remain biased due to other influences besides the public. Responsiveness is no certain result in a democracy, as there are many links in the causal chain that must be unbroken for it to be at work. Citizens can vote politicians in or out of office based on the adequacy of their policy representation. But are they up for the task? Do elected officials believe they must follow public opinion, and do they know what their constituents want? Ultimately, how strongly does government policy reflect citizen views? This essay addresses these questions. The literature reviewed here covers only policy representation in the United States. For related coverage, including outside the US sphere, see essays by Will Jennings (Mechanisms of Representation) and Christopher Wlezien (Advanced Democracies: Public Opinion and Public Policy in Advanced Democracies) as part of this Oxford Bibliographies in Political Science series. One conclusion is that public opinion is an influential force in determining public policy in the United States, especially when it comes to setting the ideological tone of policy in the states or the nation. The degree of influence may seem surprising given what we know about voters’ capabilities. Yet there is reason for caution as well as optimism. The general public’s influence sometimes faces the headwinds of hostile economic forces. Influence is not equally distributed across all segments of the public.

Preferences, Problems and Representation

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 659-681 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Jennings ◽  
Christopher Wlezien
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Public Spending ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Preferences ◽  
Aggregate Level ◽  
Survey Question ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Level Data ◽  
Over Time

Scholars studying opinion representation often rely on a survey question that asks about the “most important problem” (MIP) facing the nation. While it is known that MIP responses reflect public priorities, less is known about their connection to policy preferences. This article directly addresses the issue. First, it conceptualizes policy preferences and MIP responses, specifically considering the possibility that the latter may be either policy or outcome based. Second, using aggregate-level data from the United States and the United Kingdom, it then examines the correspondence between public spending preferences and MIP responses over time. The results indicate that MIP responses and spending preferences tap very different things, and that using MIP responses substantially understates the representational relationship between public opinion and policy.

Coverage of The United States-Pakistan Relationsin American Newspapers

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 189-214
Author(s):  
Saqib Riaz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Negative Image ◽  
The Public ◽  
Bilateral Relations ◽  
The Media ◽  
One Year

Abstract The relations between the United States of America and Pakistan have a significant impact on the world’s politics as well as in shaping the future of the globe. However, the relations between the two countries have been passing through a lot of ups and downs during the last seven decades. Media have a pivotal role in framing and shaping this ‘love and hate’ relationship. The purpose of this study was to investigate the coverage of the United States-Pakistan relations by the American newspapers because the media coverage shapes the public opinion. Two major newspapers of the United States were content analyzed for a period of one year with the help of Lexis and Nexis and the coverage of Pakistan was measured and analyzed qualitatively as well as quantitatively. The results of the study revealed that the American newspapers portrayed a highly negative image of Pakistan and most of the coverage about the bilateral relations was found as negative.

The Idea–Expression Dichotomy and its Role in Software-Related Disputes

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noam Shemtov
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
European Union ◽  
Software Industry ◽  
Copyright Law ◽  
The Public ◽  
Software Products ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Functional Aspects ◽  
Software Copyright

This chapter examines the idea-expression dichotomy principle and its application in dealing with software copyright infringement disputes. More specifically, it asks to what extent access to ideas or information embedded in the author’s work, as well as the freedom to utilize them, is justified as a matter of copyright law jurisprudence. The chapter first traces the origins of the idea-expression dichotomy and the key milestones in its development, before discussing the arguments for and against it. It also analyses the application of the idea-expression dichotomy in software-related disputes in the United Kingdom, European Union, and United States, with particular focus on functional aspects of software products and services. Finally, it looks at the public policy considerations that stand at the heart of the idea-expression dichotomy principle and their relevance to the software-industry context.

Two Models of Public Opinion: Bacon's ‘New Logic’ and Diotima's ‘Tale of Love’ (The Prothero Lecture)

1974 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 79-96
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Beer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Representative Government ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Work Done

It is appropriate that an American should address himself to the subject of public opinion. For, in terms of quantity, Americans have made the subject peculiarly their own. They have also invested it with characteristically American concerns. Most of the work done on the subject in the United States is oriented by a certain theoretical approach. This approach is democratic and rationalist. Both aspects create problems. In this paper I wish to play down the democratic problem, viz., how many of the voters are capable of thinking sensibly about public policy, and emphasize rather the difficulties that arise from modern rationalism. Here I take a different tack from most historians of the concept of public opinion, who, taking note of the origin of the term in the mid-eighteenth century, stress its connection with the rise of representative government and democratic theory.

Religious motifs within reporting of the 7/7 London bombings in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Poland: A transnational agenda-setting network study

Journalism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (10) ◽  
pp. 1323-1342
Author(s):  
Damian Guzek
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Network Analysis ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
The United States ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Religion And Ethnicity ◽  
Media Globalization ◽  
London Bombings

Existing studies have examined the significance of UK media coverage of the 7/7 London bombings. This article seeks to widen this analysis by exploring the coverage of 7/7 in the leading newspapers of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Poland comparatively using a new agenda-setting perspective that is grounded within network analysis. The study is devised to respond specifically to the contrasting arguments about the influence of media globalization versus religion and ethnicity on this reporting. It finds that the diverse approaches to religion within the countries of the analyzed newspapers appear to mitigate the reproduction of shared religious narratives in this reporting. Nevertheless, the analyzed coverage does carry common attributes and these, it argues, can be explained broadly by the influence of a US-dominated ‘lens on terror’.

scholarly journals Asia`s Role in Internet Governance

2009 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-142
Author(s):  
Park Y. J.
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Public Sector ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Internet Governance ◽  
The Public ◽  
Policy Negotiation ◽  
Global Public Policy

Most stakeholders from Asia have not actively participated in the global Internet governance debate. This debate has been shaped by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers(ICANN) since 198 and the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) since 2006. Neither ICANN nor IGF are well received as global public policy negotiation platforms by stakeholders in Asia, but more and more stakeholders in Europe and the United States take both platforms seriously. Stakeholders in Internet governance come from the private sector and civil society as well as the public sector.

scholarly journals Communicating the “Race” for the COVID-19 Vaccine: An Exploratory Study in Newspapers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luisa Massarani ◽  
Luiz Felipe Fernandes Neves
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Computer Assisted ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Understanding Of Science

The search for an effective solution to control the COVID-19 pandemic has mobilized an unprecedented effort by science to develop a vaccine against the disease, in which pharmaceutical companies and scientific institutions from several countries participate. The world closely monitors research in this area, especially through media coverage, which plays a key role in the dissemination of trustful information and in the public’s understanding of science and health. On the other hand, anti-vaccine movements dispute space in this communication environment, which raises concerns of the authorities regarding the willingness of the population to get vaccinated. In this exploratory study, we used computer-assisted content analysis techniques, with WordStat software, to identify the most addressed terms, semantic clusters, actors, institutions, and countries in the texts and titles of 716 articles on the COVID-19 vaccine, published by The New York Times (US), The Guardian (United Kingdom), and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil), from January to October 2020. We sought to analyze similarities and differences of countries that stood out by the science denialism stance of their government leaders, reflecting on the severity of the pandemic in these places. Our results indicate that each newspaper emphasized the potential vaccines developed by laboratories in their countries or that have established partnerships with national institutions, but with a more politicized approach in Brazil and a little more technical-scientific approach in the United States and the United Kingdom. In external issues, the newspapers characterized the search for the discovery of a vaccine as a race in which nations and blocs historically marked by economic, political, and ideological disputes are competing, such as the United States, Europe, China, and Russia. The results lead us to reflect on the responsibility of the media to not only inform correctly but also not to create stigmas related to the origin of the vaccine and combat misinformation.

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