Structural Shifts in British Political Attention

Abstract

In the previous two chapters, we outlined different ways of examining the policy agenda across time to illuminate aspects of post-war British politics and policy-making. But the methods used in these chapters have their limitations. Eyeballing time trends as we did in Chapter 4 does give a sense of how the agenda shifts and allows the reader to get a feel for the rise and fall in attention to issues across the period since 1945—or sections of it—but the eye can be distracted by specific ups and downs in the series that may not be helpful in characterising their fundamental substantive properties. Visual identification of time series data is also vulnerable to bias, either due to the shape of the series or from the researcher using their prior knowledge about what the important changes in the agenda are, such as from a significant partisan changes or external crises.