Reconciling Literature on Policy Responsiveness and the Accuracy of Politicians' Estimations of Public Opinion

In recent decades a wealth of literature has produced evidence that elected government are, broadly, policy responsiveness in terms of adjusting their policy positions and priorities in response to shifts in public opinion. For governments to be responsive to the opinions of voters requires that they have some awareness of public opinion. However, a recent revival in scholarship of the perceptual accuracy of politicians' estimations of public opinion has consistently found that politicians and their advisors are poor at estimating public opinion. This paper attempts to reconcile these two contradictory findings. It reviews the main contributions from both strands of literature, categorising the common operationalisations of responsiveness and perceptual accuracy in the literature, identifying the areas so far unaddressed by scholarship that can help illuminate how politicians grasp public opinion and use it to inform decision-making.