Government and Polling: Use and Impact of Polls in the Policy‐Making Process in Switzerland

As a result of various gaps in empirical research, our knowledge of how opinion polls influence political decision‐making is rather incomplete. Research, so far, has mainly concentrated on elections, and when the impact on day‐to‐day policy‐making was studied, the focus of research was often limited to the US context. For European countries, we know rather little on how strongly opinion polls influence everyday policy‐making, a fact which contrasts sharply with the controversial assumptions on the effects of such polls. Furthermore, the theoretical framework for conceptualizing the impact of opinion polls in everyday policy‐making often remains undeveloped. This article intends to contribute to closing these gaps by first elaborating a theoretical framework on how poll results influence policy‐making, and second by presenting empirical findings on the impact of opinion polls in everyday policy‐making in Switzerland. The results of this analysis provide an assessment of how the institutional and political context in Switzerland influences the use of polls and their effects on policy‐making, which both turn out to be rather weak when compared to the US