Syntax highlighting is activated on a site-by-site basis.
Should we have syntax highlighting for Emacs Lisp by default? I don't expect the presence of Emacs Lisp to be correlated with tags: any question can be answered by “put this little chunk of code in your .emacs”. However code blocks are sometimes used to present buffer contents (example).
Ideally there would be a heuristic: in the absence of a magic comment, highlight for Emacs Lisp if the code block starts with one of the characters `(;' (skipping leading whitespace), otherwise don't highlight. I don't know if this is possible with the current code; treat this answer as a feature request.
I had a go at extracting all code blocks from the site (questions and answers), classifying them according to their first non-whitespace character, and visually inspecting each category.
# 31 1 Lisp ' 3 all Lisp ( 342 all but 2 Lisp ; 30 all Lisp [ 14 none Lisp ` 4 all Lisp other 199 1 Lisp The Lisp snippet beginning with # is #(…) syntax. The “other” Lisp snippet begins with .... The two non-Lisp blocks beginning with ( are part of a LaTeX error log and a regular expression (not in Emacs syntax). The non-Lisp blocks are as you'd expect a mix of content with no coherent theme, mainly anything that one could edit (LaTeX, C, Org headers, ASCII art tables, etc.).
22 Lisp blocks start with whitespace. They're probably over-indented but I didn't investigate further.
Thus highlighting blocks as Lisp by default would work about 63% of the time. The heuristic above would work with a very high success rate: 0.5% false positive and 1% false negative (my original proposal of just (; would miss about 2% of the blocks to be highlighted).
Conclusion: we should have syntax highlighting. Preferably with the heuristic above, otherwise with Elisp syntax by default.
I haven't studied the correlation with tags. I don't expect the tags to give much information since just about any question could have a Lisp snippet in an answer.