Political Leaders and Public Engagement: The Hidden World of Informal Elite–Citizen Interaction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To date, practical and scholarly work on participatory and deliberative governance has focused on supply-side issues such as how to engage citizens in public policy. Yet little is known about the demand for public engagement, particularly from those authorised to make collective decisions. This article empirically examines how political leaders view and value public input. It draws on 51 in-depth interviews with senior national ministers from the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. The interviews reveal that leaders value public input because it informs their decisions, connects them to everyday people and ‘tests’ advice from other sources. Their support for participatory governing is, however, qualified; they find formal consultation processes too staged and antagonistic to produce constructive interactions. Instead leaders prefer informal, spontaneous conversations with individual citizens. This hidden world of informal elite–citizen interaction has implications for the design and democratic aspirations of public engagement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".