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Strategic agenda setting and Prime Ministers’ approval ratings: the heresthetic and rhetoric of political survival

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British Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

Prime Ministers who want to improve the likelihood of their political survival must increase their approval ratings. To do so, they must rely on their party’s popularity, their own reputation for competence and their ability to strategically set the public agenda. This paper focuses on strategic agenda setting and its contribution to Prime Ministers’ approval rating. Strategic agenda setting includes heresthetic moves that set the public agenda and rhetoric that frames the policy options that the agenda includes. Prime Ministers in competitive political environments use heresthetic moves to anchor the public agenda around policy dimensions they dominate and use rhetoric to frame policies as hopeful and certain in comparison to competing policies. I verify this claim using an extensive dataset of British Prime Ministers' approval ratings between 1960 and 2000.

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Notes

  1. There is no intent to disregard or belittle the importance of the party and personal valence. Both are well-documented factors in politicians’ survival and popularity.

  2. In his posthumous book, Riker associated the strategic use of dimensions with rhetoric (Riker 1996, pp. 6–9). I insist here on associating the choice of dimensions with heresthetics, as Riker did in his earlier work, and separating it from rhetoric. I do so because setting the policy dimensions goes beyond rhetoric. It is the strategic entry point to the deliberation interaction and the stepping stone to re-defining deliberations when the first choice of the dimensions fails to meet its purpose.

  3. Some describe this phenomenon as the ‘presidentialization of politics’ (Poguntke and Webb 2007; Webb and Poguntke 2013). There is a wide variety of institutional differences between the powers the heads of the executive have in presidential and parliamentary systems (Hefferman and Webb 2005). However, these powers do not mean that Prime Ministers have fewer executive powers than presidents do. Prime Ministers can and for a long time have been key figures in parliamentary politics. In fact, in the UK Prime Ministers’ control has historically been much stronger than the control presidents have in presidential systems (Dowding 2013).

  4. The URL is https://visuals.manifesto-project.wzb.eu/mpdb-shiny/cmp_dashboard_dataset/. Observed August 9, 2017.

  5. For robustness, I also tested this particular model without the ideological measures (RILE). The outcome was that the voting intentions’ variable showed (0.45)*** R-squared of 0.07 and 12.05 RMSE. Thus, the ideological position taken by the party is a critical ingredient in understanding the effect of the party on the Prime Ministers' popularity.

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  1. Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, Herzliya, Israel

    Maoz Rosenthal

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Rosenthal, M. Strategic agenda setting and Prime Ministers’ approval ratings: the heresthetic and rhetoric of political survival. Br Polit 16, 355–374 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-020-00137-5

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