Dynamics of Regulatory Policymaking in Sweden: The Role of Media Advocacy and Public Opinion

While extensive literatures study the responsiveness of policy to public opinion and the influence of interest groups, few studies look at both factors simultaneously. This article offers an analysis of the influence of media advocacy and public opinion on political attention and policy change for four regulatory issues over a relatively long period of time in Sweden. The data pools together measures of public support for specific policies with new data on attention to the policy issues in the Swedish parliament, policy developments over time and detailed coding of the claims of interest advocates in two major Swedish newspapers. Analyzing this data, a complex picture without a general tendency for either public opinion or media advocacy to act as dominant forces in producing policy change is revealed, although some evidence is found that the public is successful in stimulating political attention when it supports policy proposals aimed at changing the status quo.     

Agenda responsiveness in the European Council: public priorities,policy problems and political attention

The existence of political responsiveness in multi-level systems like the EU remains an open question despite significant recent research on the topic. This article studies whether the European Council responds to the shifting policy priorities of European citizens. More specifically, it explores the synchronic and diachronic associations between what people consider to be the most important problems and the political attention devoted to these issues from 2003 to 2014. The economic crisis after 2008 appears to have made the ranking of public concerns and the European Council agenda more alike. However, a detailed examination of the shifts in prioritisation of single issues over time reveals little evidence for dynamic issue responsiveness. Recently the European Council has paid more attention to the issues that the public considered the most pressing problems but the convergence could possibly be driven by the intensity of the underlying policy problems.