British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
14TH BRITISH ACADEMY POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP SYMPOSIUM
Abstract
Vox Pop? The Regulation of Government by Public Opinion
Dr Will Jennings
Do policymaker's respond to public opinion? Or do they respond to other information signals? And does the public, in turn, respond to the actions/outputs of policymakers? The theoretical formulation of opinion-responsive government extends from positive (credit-claiming) to negative (blame avoidance) and involve preferences (for more or less, left or right) or attention (the weighting of particular issues or policies). This paper reviews alternative models of 'opinion-responsiveness', including dynamic representation (Erikson et al. 2002) and the public thermostat (Wlezien 1995; 1996), blame avoidance and management (Hood 2002), and models of attention-driven choice (Jones 2001; Jones and Baumgartner 2005a; 2005b). On the basis of this overview it presents a general framework for conceptualizing the role of public opinion in policymaking and government. It then reports findings from a number of projects: first about opinion-responsiveness of the UK asylum system; second regarding policymaking and public attention to the economy in the UK over the period between 1960 and 2001, and third about the effectiveness of blame management strategies of public officeholders in exam fiascos in Scotland in 2000 and England in 2002.
Will Jennings' research interests include responsiveness of government to public opinion, agenda-setting and the politics of attention, blame avoidance and blame management by public officeholders, the politics and management of risk in megaprojects and megaevents, such as the Millennium Dome and London 2012, and principal/agent models of bureaucratic control and responsiveness. This applies both quantitative (e.g. time series analysis, network analysis) and qualitative (e.g. archival, interview) methods. Jennings' doctoral research on the politics and management of public celebrations has received attention from the national media during the run-up to London 2012. He is Co-Director of the UK Policy Agendas project and a member of a collaborative network, the Comparative Agendas project, which applies the policy content coding framework of the original US Policy Agendas Project for comparative analysis of European democracies. He is also Editor of Risk & Regulation the biannual magazine of the ESRC Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation.