Political actors often cite public opinion to provide support for public policy decisions. This process is made more challenging with diverse demands and perspectives of the public. How then do political actors decide which opinion gets heard? In this article, we go beyond the assumption that the practice of political representation is indistinguishable across various levels of political actors and ask, why do political actors value public opinion and how does it then influence the way in which they apply this information? Developing a multi-level approach, we employ semi-structured interviews with a wide range of political actors, including politicians, pollsters, and community activists. We find that motivations for defining and applying public opinion differs according to the hierarchy of political actors, demonstrating that the relationship between public and political actors is more nuanced and complex than what is often depicted. In particular, we find that minority views play just an important view in policymaking.

政治参与者经常引用公众舆论为公共政策决策提供支持。随着公众的不同需求和观点，这一过程变得更具挑战性。那么，政治行为者如何决定听取哪种意见？在本文中，我们超越了这样的假设，即政治代表制的实践在各个级别的政治角色之间是无法区分的，并问，为什么政治角色会重视公众舆论，然后它如何影响他们应用此信息的方式？开发多层次方法时，我们对包括政治人物，民意测验者和社区活动家在内的广泛政治参与者进行了半结构化访谈。我们发现，定义和应用民意的动机因政治参与者的等级而异，证明了公共行为者和政治行为者之间的关系比通常描述的更加细微和复杂。特别是，我们发现少数派观点在决策中仅起重要作用。