Assessing the responsiveness of Spanish policymakers to the priorities of their citizens

Abstract

This article analyses how well Spanish political elites have responded to the issues signalled as priorities preferred by Spanish citizens from the early 1990s to the present, and to what extent the degree of correspondence between citizens" and policymakers" priorities is related to elections, type of government, issue jurisdiction and institutional friction. To measure this the authors rely on Most Important Problem surveys and several databases on laws, bills, oral questions and annual speeches, coded according to the comparative agendas project. They argue that the prioritisation of issues by political elites better matches public preferences at the agenda-setting stage than at the decisionmaking stage, and that correspondence of public and policymakers" priorities is inversely related to institutional friction. The evidence also illustrates that policymakers are more responsive to public priorities on those issues without shared jurisdiction, when the executive governs without a majority and immediately after elections.