The Use of Public Opinion in Policymaking: German Bundestag Debates, 1991-2017

This study provides evidence that policymakers actively invoke public opinion in legislative deliberation. Analyzing over two decades of Bundestag debate speeches (1991–2017), we find that 99.5% of German MPs who debated policy during this period referred to public opinion at least once, and that public opinion appears in 23.2% of all debate speeches. We classify public opinion into four types. The MPs use (1) direct evidence and their own (2) presumptions to discuss or claim public opinion. They also engage in (3) formation of public opinion through persuasion and predictions, and they discuss (4) responsiveness to public opinion and the role of democratic principles. The frequent and contested usages of public opinion reveal its centrality to the policymaking process. Public opinion is deeply embedded where it is theorized but often unobserved: the act of policymaking. We develop a standardized method for detecting and categorizing references to public opinion in political texts combining traditional dictionaries and qualitative coding with a modern pre-trained multilingual language model. Our open workflow enables researchers to deploy the method on any textual data, and our interactive web-based app allows users to investigate all the annotated sentences from this period Bundestag speeches.