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

Abstract

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.

The opinion‐policy nexus in Europe and the role of political institutions

“…Future research should therefore investigate the causes of the differences in opinion‐policy linkage between issues as well as the patterns and relationships we observed in more detail – for example, by analysing whether and how institutions and issue characteristics influence the different causal links between opinion and policy. Longitudinal research designs and in‐depth case studies searching for direct evidence of policy makers listening to the public and the public adjusting its preferences to policy have great potential to address such questions (Rasmussen et al ). Importantly, such work could also consider whether not only individual institutions but also specific configurations of institutions affect the linkage between opinion and policy.…”

“…; Rasmussen et al. ; Wlezien ; Soroka & Wlezien ) and often uses aggregate indicators of policy (Stimson et al. ; Erikson et al.…”

Party government and policy responsiveness. Evidence from three parliamentary democracies

“…However, future research should complement our research by scrutinising the reciprocal linkage between opinion and policy further in studies of the small subset of specific policy issues for which time series data are available (e.g. Rasmussen et al 2018b) and by relying on qualitative and experimental methods.…”

Structure Reversal of Online Public Opinion for the Heterogeneous Health Concerns under NIMBY Conflict Environmental Mass Events in China

“…Thus, in the process of using the protest to express interest demands about health and to achieve reasonable and rational gains, the diversified interactions become inevitable between the government benefiting from the policy and the social public impaired with this policy. Although some literature had examined policy responsiveness to the public and to interest groups separately, studies of public policy that integrated both factors were limited [14]. Besides, the traditional dynamic models described the interactions between individuals in real life, as well focusing on the general public opinion diffusion under linear or nonlinear rules [24], but there still remains no work that systematically considers the government response capacity on the role of network public opinion.…”

“…Although prior studies proposed heterogeneous interaction models [7], most of them were the basic dynamic models that could describe the traditional diffusion of public opinion from the individual level. Nevertheless, the significance of interactions between individual and government agencies cannot be overlooked [14]. Accordingly, this research seeks to propose an improved model to investigate the structure reversal of online public opinions of NIMBY facility development considering multiple heterogeneities of individual health concerns and government responses simultaneously.…”