Issues of high potential: A novel methodology to uncover unactivated public policy demands

Vote-seeking parties have a clear incentive to align their policies with voter demands, but they do not always do so. When demands go unaddressed, this gap between opinion and responsiveness can weaken trust in democracy and boost support for outsider parties. Despite their relevance to electoral competition, progress in uncovering unmet demands and measuring their relative importance to voters has been limited. This study develops a systematic method to prospectively detect ‘issues of high potential’ where there is bottom-up public demand, elite neglect, and the policy could motivate vote choice if a party were to adopt it. I combine open-ended survey responses, parliamentary speech analysis and a conjoint experiment, which is applied to the United Kingdom. I find that this is successful at uncovering a number of high potential policies, including those that are popular and motivating, those that are divisive and polarising, and those that divide public opinion evenly but motivate voting more strongly on one side. The methodology and findings have important implications for issue voting, political entrepreneurship and democratic responsiveness.