Issue Responsiveness in Canadian Politics: Are Parties Responsive to the Public Salience of Climate Change in the Question Period?

• Published date: 01 March 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231194270
• Author: R. Michael Alvarez,Jacob Morrier
• Date: 01 March 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(1) 167–183

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129231194270

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Issue Responsiveness in Canadian Politics:

Are Parties Responsive to the Public

Salience of Climate Change

in the Question Period?

R. Michael Alvarez

1

and Jacob Morrier

1



Abstract

This paper explores how politicians respond to the public salience of policy issues when det ermining which topics to

publicly address. Using new data and state-of-the-art methodology, our study provides a fresh perspective on this

fundamental question. We focus on a multi-party parliamentary system, specif‌ically the Can adian House of Commons,

with a specif‌ic emphasis on the issue of climate change. To assess the attention given by political parties to various policy

issues, we analyze transcripts from the Question Period spanning from April 2006 to June 2021. To gauge the public’s

level of concern for these issues, we incorporate data obtained from Google Trends. Employing an instrumental variable

estimation strategy, our study causally estimates the extent to which the public salience of climate change inf‌luences elite

attention. Our f‌indings reveal that the public salience of climate change signif‌icantly inf‌luences the atten tion given to this

issue by parties, albeit with noticeable partisan variations. Moreover, our research highlights the effectiveness of the

Question Period in compelling the government to address challenging or potentially embarrassing issues. Lastly, we

uncover evidence suggesting that the Liberal Party of Canada successfully increased the public salience of climate change

during its tenure in government.

Keywords

Canadian Politics, Question Period, Issue Responsiveness, Topic Modeling, Climate Change, Instrumental Variable

Regression

Are politiciansresponsive to public opinion? This question

undeniably standsas one of the most prominent subjects of

interest in politicalscience. Consequently,it lies at the core

of a substantial body of research. The answer to this

question carries signif‌icant normative implications for the

effective functioning of representative democracy, as it is

widely acknowledged that it requires political elites to be

somewhat responsive to public opinion.

Prior research on political representation has estab-

lished that political elites are generally responsive to

public opinion. However, many questions remain un-

answered. Firstly, although a considerable amount of

research has been dedicated to assessing the congruence

between the policy positions of political representatives

and the preferences of the public, commonly referred to as

“policy responsiveness,”our comprehension of “issue

responsiveness”remains limited. Issue responsiveness is

characterized by the extent to which the issues that pol-

iticians focus on is proportional to the public salience

attached to those issues, irrespective of the specif‌ic po-

sitions politicians adopt on those matters (Spoon and

Klüver 2014;Wagner and Meyer 2014;Klüver and

Spoon 2016;Barber´

a et al. 2019). Secondly, a consid-

erable portion of the research on political representation

has focused on the United States and its unique political

institutions, potentially limiting its generalizability to

countries with different systems, such as multi-party and

parliamentary systems (Shapiro 2011). Thirdly, most of

Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of

Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jacob Morrier, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California

Institute of Technology, 1200 E California Blvd, Mail Code 228-77,

Pasadena, CA 91125-0001, USA.

Email: jmorrier@caltech.edu

Data Availability Statement included at the end of the article

the previous studies have been correlational in nature,

lacking the ability to make causal claims. Finally, very few

studies have addressed political elites’responsiveness

concerning one of the most pressing issues of our time:

climate change.

This paper aims to provide answers to these lingering

questions. Our study focuses on the issue responsiveness

of political parties within the context of a multi-party

parliamentary system, specif‌ically the Canadian House of

Commons, spanning a 15-year period from April 2006 to

June 2021. We examine the extent to which parties’

emphasis on climate change corresponds to its public

salience. Additionally, we explore potential variations in

issue responsiveness across different parties. Our analysis

combines machine learning techniques with conventional

causal inference methods to generate causal estimates of

issue responsiveness.

We have chosen to focus our analysis on Canada for

several reasons. Similar to many developed nations, cli-

mate change has gained signif‌icant attention in Canada

over the past decade as citizens have witnessed the tan-

gible effects of a changing climate, including notable

variations in temperature, precipitation, snow, ice, per-

mafrost, and sea levels. Additionally, the production of

fossil fuels remains a crucial aspect of the Canadian

economy, positioning it as the world’s fourth largest oil

producer and sixth largest natural gas producer. Canada,

like most Western democracies except for the United

States, operates within a multi-party system (Johnston

2017). The current party system revolves around three

national political parties: the right-wing Conservative

Party (CPC), the center-leaning Liberal Party (LPC), and

the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP). Climate

change remains a contentious issue, with noticeable

partisan differences in attitudes towards it. We expect this

partisan heterogeneity to manifest in varying levels of

issue responsiveness among parties, inf‌luenced by their

respective issue ownership and institutional roles.

We employ cutting-edge approaches to measuring

issue attention and salience. Specif‌ically, we quantify the

public salience of policy issues through their relative

popularity on Google’s search engine. Additionally, we

evaluate the attention political parties allocate to these

issues by analyzing the topic composition of interventions

made by their members during the Question Period. These

metrics provide representative indicators of the attention

that politicians and the public give to policy issues.

Additionally, the use of web search data helps mitigate

certain biases that have affected previous survey studies

on issue salience.

The Question Period holds signif‌icant importance in

the political landscape of Canada. Taking place whenever

the House of Commons convenes, it garners extensive

media coverage. Its primary objective is to provide

Members of Parliament, particularly those from opposi-

tion parties, a platform to inquire about current issues and

hold government ministers responsible for their actions.

The dynamics of political parties’behavior during the

Question Period, especially regarding their choice of

topics to address, remain poorly understood. This paper

aims to f‌ill this knowledge gap. As various parliamentary

institutions adopt similar procedures, the insights derived

from this study are relevant and applicable to other

countries as well (Green-Pedersen and Mortensen 2010;

Vliegenthart and Walgrave 2011;Bevan and John 2016;

Borghetto and Russo 2018).

From a methodological perspective, this paper show-

cases the utilization of machine learning in conjunction

with traditional causal identif‌ication techniques to address

substantive questions in political science. Our paper is part

of the expanding body of research that leverages natural

language processing methods to analyze parliamentary

speeches (Rheault et al. 2016;Abercrombie and Batista-

Navarro 2020;Guber, Bohr, and Dunlap 2021;Cochrane

et al. 2022). While the majority of this literature has

centered around the United States and the United King-

dom, our study extends its scope beyond these two

countries. We use the resulting measures to carry out

standard causal analysis.

Estimating issue responsiveness presents a consider-

able challenge due to simultaneous causality. Indeed, the

public salience of policy issues can be inf‌luenced by, as

well as inf‌luence, their prevalence in Question Period

interventions. To neutralize this potential source of en-

dogeneity, we adopt an instrumental variables estimation

strategy. Specif‌ically,we use the public salience of climate

change in the United States as an instrument for the public

salience of climate change in Canada. By employing this

identif‌ication strategy, we can establish causal relation-

ships and draw reliable conclusions regarding issue

responsiveness.

Our f‌indings indicate that Canada’s three major na-

tional political parties adapt the topics they address during

the Question Period to align with the public salience of

climate change. There is considerable partisan hetero-

geneity in this behavior. Furthermore, our analysis reveals

that the Question Period, by granting agenda-setting

authority to opposition parties, effectively prompts the

government to address challenging or potentially em-

barrassing issues. Lastly, we provide evidence suggesting

that the Liberal Party of Canada, while in power, suc-

cessfully increased the public salience of climate change.

A study closely aligned with ours was conducted by

Penner, Blidook, and Soroka (2006). Similarly to us, they

explore the relationship between the attention parties give

to policy issues during the Question Period and the public

salience of those issues. Their f‌indings align with our

conclusions, indicating that the attention dedicated to

168 Political Research Quarterly 77(1)