CATNIP · Citizen Attitudes Towards National and International Problems

Political scientists have collected rich data for understanding the preferences of citizens regarding which policies their governments ought to enact, as well as for investigating where these preferences do and do not exist, and how they arise. In contrast, we have poor data and methods for understanding which problems citizens think are most severe and which government policy should be urgently addressing. These questions of problems and priorities are difficult to investigate because they are challenging to formulate in terms of closed-ended survey questions that yield cross-nationally and inter-temporally comparable data. This project addresses this gap by using innovative techniques to measure citizens’ views about problem severity and priority. The proposed applications, in turn, will push forward our understanding of how citizens understand what politics and policy-making are trying to achieve, how they interact with media information sources and their representatives, all of which are core concerns of the study of political behaviour and public opinion. This research would enable a major step forward in our understanding of several political science questions. First, which people, in which countries, are relatively engaged with and prioritise global problems (e.g. international environmental, security, and economic issues) by comparison to more immediate local or national problems? Are views about political problems generally stable over time, at the level of individual citizens or at the level of populations? Second, to what extent do major media sources and/or political actors set the problem agenda for citizens, versus responding to citizens’ existing problem agenda? Third, what are the electoral implications of politicians and media emphasizing or de-emphasizing specific problems? When is articulating a problem, perhaps even in the absence of articulating a policy solution, an important component of gaining credibility with voters?