イシュー・セイリアンスと政策変化

Abstract

One of the conventional wisdoms in affluent democracies says that a large policy change is very unlikely to occur. Despite this conventional wisdom, a fundamental policy reform has sometimes been successfully carried out in those countries. How can such a successful policy change be explained? Recently numerous attempts have been made to identify factors responsible for the policy change. As one critical factor, some emphasize “issue salience”; the more salient an issue, the more likely a policy change. How the high salience of an issue leads to a large policy change, however, has not been fully examined. This article states that a legislator's perception of issue salience matters; one of the critical conditions for a large policy change is that legislators perceive a particular issue as highly salient. When estimating the issue salience and determining their policy stance, legislators confront serious uncertainty. This article presents some game-theoretical models dealing with legislators' interaction under uncertainty, and demonstrates that a game-theoretical perspective contributes to understanding the relationship between issue salience and policy change.