Salience is how prominent an issue is in a person’s mind or in public attention at a given time. It is most often measured by asking people to name the most important problem facing the country. Political scientist Christopher Wlezien argues that this measure confuses two things, the importance of an issue and the degree to which it is currently a problem, which is why My Vote Forward keeps salience separate from considered priority.
Definition
Wlezien traces the term’s use: it “originally was used by voting behavior scholars to designate the importance individual voters attach to different issues when evaluating political candidates. In effect, greater salience meant greater importance”.1 In wider use, salience means prominence: an issue is salient when it is on people’s minds, in the news, or in conversation. On this site, salience means prominence in attention, and priority means a considered judgment of importance. The two often move together but need not.
Origin and history
Salience became measurable through survey questions. Gallup’s open question, “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?”,2 became the standard measure. Wlezien writes that “in attempting to measure salience, scholars initially turned to voters’ responses to the standard survey question that asks about the ‘most important problem’ (MIP) facing the nation,” and later “turned to aggregate MIP responses to characterize the broader public salience of issues over time,” including in McCombs and Shaw’s 1972 study of agenda-setting.1
Wlezien’s critique is central. He proposes that the research “confuses at least two very different characteristics of issue salience”: the “importance” of issues and the degree to which they are a “problem,” and that “the confusion is rooted in basic measurement”.1 MIP responses, he argues, “capture the most important problems to individual voters and the public, not the importance of issues per se”.1 His analysis of Gallup data from 1945 to 2000 grouped responses into foreign affairs, economic issues, and other problems, and examined how they move over time.1
How salience is measured and used
The main measures each capture something slightly different:
- Open “most important problem” questions capture what comes to mind unprompted. They are sensitive to news and to how bad conditions are.
- Closed lists show higher salience for listed items. Pew Research Center found that when the economy was offered as an explicit choice in 2008, 58% chose it, compared with 35% who volunteered it unprompted.3
- Media attention measures count coverage, which is a cause or companion of public salience rather than salience itself.
Salience is used to explain which issues drive votes and which get legislative attention. On Wlezien’s argument, MIP salience can rise when an issue is going badly and fall when it improves, so a falling MIP share does not necessarily mean people care less. A widely shared priority can have low salience in a quiet period.
Common confusions and neighboring terms
- Salience vs. priority. Priority is a considered ranking of importance; salience is prominence now.
- Salience vs. opinion. An issue can be highly salient while most people hold weak or mixed opinions about any specific proposal.
- Salience vs. intensity. Intensity is how strongly a person holds an opinion; salience is how much attention an issue gets.
- Salience vs. agenda-setting. Agenda-setting is the process that raises or lowers salience.
How My Vote Forward uses the term
My Vote Forward asks for priorities as a ranking or allocation of a listed set of subjects, not as an open “most important problem” question. That design does not escape salience: news-driven shifts are a real effect on results, and the framework does not claim to remove them. Measurement choices are explained in Measurement and Collective priorities.
What My Vote Forward can and cannot do here
My Vote Forward can separate salience from priority in its design and disclose how priorities were asked. It cannot prevent a news event from shifting participants’ rankings, and it cannot tell, from rankings alone, whether a subject rose because people care more or because conditions worsened.
Unresolved questions
- Should a priorities system ask separately “how important is this?” and “how well is this going?” to address Wlezien’s distinction?
- How long after a major news event should results be treated with caution?
- Is low salience of a widely shared priority a problem the system should flag, or a sign that things are working?
Sources
- Christopher Wlezien, “On the Salience of Political Issues,” Nuffield College Politics Working Paper 2003-W10, University of Oxford. nuff.ox.ac.uk/…
- Gallup, “Most Important Problem.” news.gallup.com/poll/1675/most-important-problem.aspx
- Pew Research Center, “Writing Survey Questions.” pewresearch.org/writing-survey-questions
