Throughout history there has always been different views on the role played by the public opinion on policy making and its influence over elected officials. Winston Churchill once said: “no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion”, while Abraham Lincoln was: “public opinion in this country is everything”(The Guardian, Public opinion can play a positive role in policy making, https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2012/sep/03/public-opinion-influence-policy).
Sometimes, what can influence a government decision in one country can do the same opposite in another one. An article by Andrea Giuliani, Young Global Changer of 2020, reported that the positive outcome of a policy is strictly related to what citizens deem to prioritize. For example, environmental policies have been increasingly effective with the rise in climate change awareness. Giuliani says that global governance forums should be more focused on public opinion, to avoid a detachment from the people and lose their support, legitimacy, and authority(The Relevance of Public Opinion for Governments, Supranational Organizations and Global Policy Forums, Andrea Giuliani, https://www.global-solutions-initiative.org/young-global-changers-blog/relevance-of-public-opinion/). Andrea master’s thesis project researched the impact that public opinion had on changes in expenditure of the European Commission in ten policy fields. The result is that the policy decisions taken by the European Commission were and still are strongly influenced by the feeling that the general public has on those policy issues, in particular by educated citizens(Ibid).
An article by Northwestern university Public Opinion and Social Policy and written by Lisa Stein, takes a different road compared to Giuliani’s article, saying that there is no direct correlation between public opinion and policy making. In particular, according to Stein, politicians have their own agenda, and they are keener to follow that, than being influenced by what their constituents think and want(Northwestern, Lisa Stein, Public Opinion and Social Policy, https://www.sesp.northwestern.edu/news-center/inquiry/2003-fall/public-opinion-and-social-policy.html ).
A 2023 survey from the European Commission brings up that 93% of EU citizens are aware that climate change is a serious problem and that 88% agree to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. In addition to that, European public opinion thinks that climate change is the one of most serious problems facing the world alongside poverty, hunger and lack of drinking water, besides armed conflicts. The data explain pretty well that the public opinion and the Union policy on the environment are on the same page. Overseas according to a Gallup September 2022 poll, an historic American analytics and advisory company, only 3% of Americans mentioned issues related to climate change and overall it is not seen as the priority for the public opinion, unlike gun control, economy and immigration. Nevertheless, Gallup’s climate policy suggestions were backed in a survey by 89%, showing a huge cleavage with the previous data. In the UK according to the Office for National Statistics, 74% of adults aged 16 years and over, at the end of 2022, felt very or somewhat worried about climate change, a data that somehow follows the commitment taken by the British government to reach zero emissions by 2050(Office for National Statistics Worries about climate change, Great Britain: September to October 2022, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/articles/worriesaboutclimatechangegreatbritain/septembertooctober2022#:~:text=During%20the%20latest%20period%2C%2074,6%20to%2017%20October%202021).
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