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

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.