Are They Even Listening? Comparative Case Studies on Government Responsiveness to Public Opinion and Interest Groups

In recent years, a number of important quantitative studies in both the American context and in European countries have addressed the responsiveness of policymakers to lobbying actors and public opinion or certain constituents. While extremely insightful, these studies black-box the development of these issues over time and the actual processes behind political decision making. In this paper, we will trace such developments on four issues – two comparative case studies on salient public policy issues in the United Kingdom (The Air Passenger Duty and Subsidies for Nuclear Power Plants) and Denmark (Control of Antibiotics in Framing and VAT on food products) . We track media debates by active lobbying and partisan actors on these issues over time and relate these to available public opinion data. Moreover, through interviews with political decision makers, as well as interest groups on both sides of the issues, we gauge whether, when and how public opinion and attention were relevant factors in understanding the resulting policies. Based on these cases, the paper identifies conditions that help or hinder responsiveness to existing public preferences, as well as blind spots in existing research designs.