The opinion-agenda linkage - How letters from the public to the Prime Minister impact the policy agenda.

Abstract

Every year, the Australian prime minister (PM) receives around 150,000 pieces of correspondence. The proportion of Australians who report contacting a politician is increasing, with similar patterns evident across the world. Between 1996 & 2000, Australians wrote pleading for the government to intervene in the humanitarian crisis in East Timor, others argued against a second Sydney airport at Badgerys Creek, and avid gardeners sought funding for Australia's bid to host the World Horticultural Festival. People write to politicians seeking to have an influence and to make a difference - this link between the public and political leaders is crucial for democracy.

Political leaders have an existential need to understand the breadth and depth of public opinion. How much does any particular issue matter? Will it change people's votes? For that reason, public opinion polls that only identify where the majority opinion sits may not be as useful for political leaders, because they do not disclose issue salience or intensity. Unprompted expressions of opinion (such as phone calls, correspondence and protests) may therefore be particularly valuable for political leaders to understand what matters to their constituents. This may mean that political leaders are responsive to the opinion expressed by the attentive public, as it may indicate that the individual's electoral behaviour can be influenced.

To investigate whether political leaders are responsive to opinion expressed by the attentive public, I examine letters sent by the public to Australian PM, Mr John Howard, for the period 1996-2000. I develop a dataset of the topic and volume of these letters, on a fortnightly basis, coded against the Comparative Agendas Project. I compare the topics of the letters to the topics of Mr Howard's speeches, to see if these are congruent with, or responsive to, the topics of the letters. In addition, I investigate an alternative proposition, whether the letters are responsive to Mr Howard's speeches and other government actions, which would demonstrate that the political elite are setting the public agenda. I rely on interviews with Mr Howard and senior staff in the prime minister's office, and detailed archival research, to understand how these letters were used by Mr Howard and his staff.

My study finds that there are two broad types of letters. First, letters expressing an opinion, and second, letters seeking help/information. The first group of letters are predominantly written by partisans, who are unlikely to change their vote. Given the Australian electoral system (compulsory voting; preferential voting; and majoritarian electoral system), this means there is little incentive for political leaders to be responsive to this cohort. My study also finds no evidence of statistically significant links between the topics of the letters and the topics of Mr Howard's speeches, in either a responsiveness, or elite agenda-setting direction. However, when analysed qualitatively, the vast majority of topics are a response to an announcement by the government, usually opposing a new government decision.

I contribute to scientific knowledge in two important ways. First, by analysing the topics of the letters, I open a new empirical domain for the study of public opinion and responsiveness, to better reflect how the public actually expresses their opinion and how the political elite actually engage with that opinion. Second, I contribute to the responsiveness literature, by identifying circumstances in which political leaders are less likely to be responsive. This reflects our existing understanding that institutions and political systems change the level of responsiveness to public opinion. The overarching conclusion is that understanding the role letters (and other forms of public opinion) play in creating links between the public and political elite will improve our understanding of responsiveness and the way democracy functions. Show more