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This paper argues that agenda/opinion dynamics should be represented in the form of an error-correction model, where political agendas and public opinion coexist in a long-run equilibrium that is subject to short-run corrections. As such, responsiveness is theorised as an interdependent relationship between the political agenda and public opinion, where dynamic effects include both short-run corrections (i.e. negative feedback) and long-run equilibrium forces/friction. This paper considers time series data for the United Kingdom for the period between 1959 and 2001 on the content of the legislative agenda articulated in the Queen's Speech at the opening of each parliamentary session, coded according to the framework of the Policy Agendas project (see Baumgartner and Jones 1991; 1993; Jones and Baumgartner 2005), plus reconstituted public opinion data on Gallup's "most important problem" from British Political Opinion 1937 - 2001 (King et al 2001) and the original Gallup Index. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ since 1945. While most studies focus on utilitarian or cultural perspectives to explain the resilience of the relationship, this paper adopts a constructivist approach. The ‘special relationship’ has become a key norm for British foreign policy makers that shapes decisions and policy goals. The ‘idea’ of the special relationship has dominated British foreign policy from Churchill to Blair even if the rationale for its existence has been transformed by changes in relative power and despite the difficulties that the ‘special relationship’ has caused for Britain’s relations with Europe, the Middle East and domestic public opinion. The paper examines the creation of the ‘special relationship’ and the impact of foreign policy crises upon it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Public opinion often diverges widely from reality on the size and makeup of immigrant populations but prior research has not established whether the media has any causal role in the construction of these perceptions. This paper examines how actually-occurring media portrayals of immigrants in Britain--drawn from recent large-scale quantitative studies of the British national press--affect attitudes toward and perceptions of immigrants among members of the British public. We report on an original survey experiment that tests the impact of various news frames. Several outcomes are measured including the individual's estimates of the size of the immigrant group, perceptions of who immigrants are, and immigration policy preferences. We find support for the notion that even subtle coaxing can shift public conceptions of immigration, in this case toward more realistic understandings of the overall size and make-up of the immigrant population in Britain. The implications for the link between media frames and public opinion arising from these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opinion research on immigration attitudes has largely overlooked the question of how survey respondents understand the term "immigrants." This paper investigates latent perceptions of immigrants, termed "imagined immigration," among members of the British public. Using novel survey data, I examine who members of the British public have in mind when they think of "immigrants." I find that public perceptions of immigration diverge significantly from the set of people identified as immigrants in government statistics and targeted by restrictionist policies. In particular, public perceptions focus on asylum seekers and permanent arrivals, while mostly ignoring international students, the largest group of immigrants to Britain and a target of new restrictive immigration policies. I also show that many common perceptions of "imagined immigration" are strongly associated with individual preferences for reduced immigration, suggesting that imagined immigration should be considered in future research as a possible determinant of anti-immigration policy preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Departing from the holistic, cross-national approach of much of the previous research into public opinion on European integration, this article offers a comparative analysis of French and British public opinion on the EU in the post- Maastricht era. In particular, it examines the effects of individual utilitarian appraisals on EU support and considers whether extant national socio-economic records and attachments to particular socio-economic models moderate these effects. Using Eurobarometer data, it is thus demonstrated that in a context of increased visibility and politicisation of the EU in France and the UK, citizens' individual benefits extracted from European integration are a source of EU support for both countries - and are playing an ever-increasing role - but that source of support is nevertheless less powerful for British citizens than for French citizens. The utilitarian argument as a vector of EU support is ultimately delimited by the national socioeconomic situation of each nation and the type of EU model favoured by French and British individuals. In the light of these findings the paper concludes that EU policy makers need to devise flexible modes of integration whilst achieving positive outcomes in the socio-economic sphere if they are to satisfy both national publics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our goal in this paper is to reinvigorate the comparative study of partisan effects in an effort to begin to answer the following question: is partisanship a phenomenon that travels beyond the shores of the United States? If so, does it have different effects in different political contexts and, if that is the case, then why? To do so, we conduct experiments to test the impact of party cues on policy opinions of both partisans and non-partisans in one of the oldest democracies in the world, Great Britain, and two new post-communist democracies, Hungary and Poland. Our experiments test the effects of party cues on public opinion formation in two ways: Single Party Cue (SPC) experiments examine whether being told that one's preferred party supports a particular policy proposal makes the respondent more likely to support that proposal; while Multiple Party Cue (MPC) experiments test whether the explicit linking of positions on a policy question to a number of political parties makes respondents more likely to select their preferred party's position on that issue. Our findings are nuanced but clear: party cues can indeed have effects on public opinion formation by partisans outside of the United States, and these effects are both stronger and are more sharply distinguished between partisans and non-partisans in the established democracy of Great Britain. That being said, at least some of our findings from Hungary look surprisingly more similar to the results from Great Britain than they do to the results from Poland. [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]

A large and growing body of research demonstrates a correspondence between public opinion and policy behavior. Almost all of this research has focused on the US, however. Do similar patterns obtain in other countries? Or is the US unique? This paper represents one step towards answering these questions. We extend previous research on the dynamics of spending preferences and budgetary policy in the US, using comparable longitudinal measures of public preferences and government spending in the US, UK, and Canada. The nature and magnitude of opinion-policy connections vary across both policy functions and countries. We explore this variance here, and suggest several possible explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of the extent to which it still remains appropriate to use the term civic culture in the 21st century. Can the term be used in a political system in which there is dwindling public trust and respect for politicians and political institutions? How should we describe the contemporary political system? This paper looks at the recently conducted citizen audit of Britain to examine the public’s contemporary attitudes and behaviour in relation to these questions; in particular, it examines the public attitudes towards the political system in general, levels of political trust. political competence and efficacy, the level and range of political activities and associational involvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research comparing open-list and closed-list PR electoral systems has highlighted the way in which ballot type affects candidates' electoral strategies. We depart from this literature by emphasizing that ballot type may also affect the relative success of different kinds of parties. When voters have strong opinions about an issue on which major parties are internally divided, open-list ballots give voters an opportunity to express their preference on that issue without having to support a\niche" party. We provide experimental evidence of this phenomenon from the UK, where we show in hypothetical European Parliament elections that using an open-list ballot would shift support from UKIP (the Eurosceptic party) to Eurosceptic candidates of the Conservative Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While previous research on the reciprocal effects of citizens' issue attitudes and their party support emphasize citizens' issue positions, political competition revolves equally around issue salience, i.e., debates over which issue areas political parties should prioritize. Using multi-wave panel data from Germany and Great Britain, we analyze the reciprocal effects of citizens' issue salience and their party support over the period 1984-2009, and we conclude that citizens' issue priorities both influence and are influenced by their party attachments, and, moreover, that these effects are linked to parties' long-term policy emphases as articulated in their election manifestos. This effect is strongest among supporters of a small issue-orientated niche party, the Greens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the presence of immigrants or minorities in a local community affect racial and xenophobic attitudes? Synthesizing public opinion, economic, and demographic data from the United Kingdom, we explore this question. By taking advantage of cross-sectional variation in minority populations, we develop and test hypotheses concerning the causal relationships among the presence of immigrant populations and xenophobic sentiments. We find that larger immigrant populations dampen xenophobic attitudes, supportive of the contact theory. In clarifying this relationship, we contribute to ongoing debates over contact theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares public opinion trends in the U.S., Great Britain and Israel to determine the dynamics of public opinion after terrorist attacks. The metrics compared and considered in the analysis include, the overall sense of threat due to terrorism, willingness to cede civil liberties and government approval ratings. It relates the possibility for shrewd government officials to use the attacks in order to pass civil liberty-reducing counterterror law. It develops a model for how public opinion constrains and drives actions after the attacks.

What determines a democratic public's willingness to tolerate the human and material costs of sustaining military operations to victory? Although there is a rich literature on the factors that affect public support for the use of military force, few studies adopt a research method explicitly designed to answer this question. Employing a cross-sectional time series design with data from 12 U.S. and British military interventions between 1950 and 2003, I test whether public support for sustaining an ongoing military operation is determined by the same factors that have been identified as predictors of support for the use of military force in studies that have focused on hypothetical scenarios and studies that have analyzed the effect of question wording on support for ongoing operations. The results suggest that there is a considerable disconnect between what the public claims it would support and the types of military operations the public actually shows a willingness to sustain once they are underway. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the relationships between policy, public opinion and the media, through an examination of the agenda-setting functions of print media in Great Britain and France on the latest round of European Union (EU) enlargement. It examines if the frames the media apply to enlargement translate into patterns the public uses to interpret it.

Ever since Converse?s landmark study, ?The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,? scholars have struggled to pinpoint factors associated with observed levels of constraint and stability of ideology in the mass public (and subgroups thereof). We suggest that campaigns provide information which facilitates ideological reasoning among the mass public (though not necessarily evenly across subgroups within the mass public). To test this hypothesis, we analyze panel data to determine if constraint and stability are greater within and across election years than within and across non-election years, respectively. An initial analysis of the British Election Panel Study (BES), 1992-1997, the British Election Panel Study, 1997-2001, and the American National Election Panel Study (NES), 1992-1997 provides some support that campaigns effect constraint and stability. Specifically, responses to questions that tap into a left/right spectrum in the BES 1997-2001 dataset and the NES 1992-1997 dataset indicate that constraint (as measured by inter-item reliability) is greater in election years than in non-election years. Analyses of these two datasets also indicate that temporal within-unit stability (as reflected by a Pearson correlation) between responses to a specific question given in election year surveys is greater than stability between responses when at least one of the two surveys was done in an off-year. Though this pattern is not found in the BES 1992-1997 data, its absence may be due to systematic, ?real? change in opinions during this period in the U.K. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]