Priority: a judgment of what deserves attention first

A priority is a judgment of relative importance: which subjects deserve public attention first. A shared priority says nothing about which policy a person prefers within that subject; two people who both rank housing first may want opposite housing policies. My Vote Forward keeps priorities separate from opinions on proposals for exactly that reason.

Definition

A priority, as used on this site, is an ordering or weighting of subjects by importance to the person stating it. It answers “what matters most to you now?” and not “what should be done?” The site glossary states the working definition: a shared priority says nothing about which policy a person prefers within that subject (see the short entry in the glossary). A priority can be expressed as a ranking (first, second, third) or as a resource allocation (how much of a fixed budget each subject should get). Those are different measurements, and the framework keeps them apart.

Origin and history

Asking the public what it considers most important has a long history in survey research. Gallup’s open question, “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?”,⁠¹ is the best known. Political scientists used answers to that question to study how the public’s attention shifts. Christopher Wlezien traces this practice: scholars first used “most important problem” responses to indicate the importance of issues to individual voters, and later used aggregate responses to track public salience over time.⁠² The study of how the news shapes those rankings is called agenda-setting, named in McCombs and Shaw’s 1972 article.⁠³

How priorities are measured

Priorities are measured in at least three ways, and they do not give the same answer.

• Open questions such as Gallup’s ask people to name a problem in their own words. They capture what is top of mind, which is close to salience.
• Closed lists ask people to choose from named subjects. Pew Research Center reports that when the economy was offered as an explicit choice in 2008, 58% chose it, while only 35% volunteered it in an open version.⁠⁴ The list itself shapes the priority.
• Rankings and allocations ask people to order a full set of subjects or to divide a fixed budget across them. These force tradeoffs that open questions do not.

Wlezien’s critique adds a deeper problem. He argues that research using “most important problem” data confuses two different things: the “importance” of issues and the degree to which they are a “problem”.⁠² A subject can drop off the list because conditions improved, not because people stopped caring about it. A priority measure therefore needs to say which of those it is capturing.

Common confusions and neighboring terms

• Priority vs. opinion. A priority orders subjects; an opinion takes a side on a specific proposal. Mixing the two produces claims such as “the public wants more housing,” which might only mean the public thinks housing matters.
• Priority vs. salience. Salience is prominence in attention, often driven by news. A priority is a considered judgment of importance. They often move together, but a stable priority can coexist with low salience.
• Priority vs. resource allocation. A ranking says housing comes before transport; an allocation says how much more. See Tradeoffs.
• Priority vs. effectiveness assessment. A subject can matter greatly while a specific program in it works poorly.

How My Vote Forward uses the term

Priorities are the first of three things a person can express in My Vote Forward, under its organizing language “My priorities. My opinion. My vote.” The framework asks people to rank subjects separately from stating opinions on proposals, so that a shared concern is visible even when people disagree on solutions. The design is described in Priorities, and the methods for combining many people’s priorities, with their limits, are discussed in Collective priorities and Measurement. Any published summary of priorities is an aggregate released on a schedule as a published release, with its method and denominator.

Unresolved questions

• Should priorities be asked as rankings, allocations, or both, given that each method produces different results?
• How can a priority measure separate “this matters” from “this is going badly,” the confusion Wlezien identifies?
• How often should people be asked to update priorities without creating fatigue or chasing the news cycle?