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Work exploring the relationship between public opinion and public policy over time has largely been restricted to the US. A wider application of this line of research can provide valuable insights into how representation varies across political systems, however. This paper takes a first step in this direction using a new body of data on public opinion and government spending in the UK. The analyses reveal that the British public appears to notice and respond (thermostatically) to changes in public spending in particular domains, even more so than in the US. At the same time, the magnitude and structure of UK policymakers' response to public preferences is less pronounced and more general. The findings are suggestive about the structuring role of institutions on opinion representation across countries. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines homogeneity and heterogeneity in preferences for public policy, across income and education levels and party identification, and across policy domains in the US, UK and Canada. Do preferences differ across segments of the public at particular points in time? What about over time - do we observe a uniform swing across different groups (parallel publics), or does the flow of opinion differ across party, income, and education? Our data on public preferences for government spending show cross-sectional heterogeneity across sub-aggregates, but very high levels of over-time homogeneity in trends across subgroups. The structure of preference change across subgroups is fairly similar; most notably, thermostatic responsiveness to policy holds generally across the subgroups. This is especially true for broad domestic aggregates of opinion and policy. There still are some differences in feedback, particularly across education levels, as the highly educated are significantly more responsive to spending change over time. People with low and middling levels of education still do change their preferences for spending in response to what policymakers do, just to a lesser extent, at least in certain policy domains. This fits with the large and growing literature that demonstrates real differences owing to information levels. There also are significant differences across partisan subgroupings in various domains. The implications of these findings are considered in the concluding section. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]