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The link between public opinion and policy is of special importance in representative democracies. Policymakers’ responsiveness to public opinion is critical. Public responsiveness to policy itself is as well. Only a small number of studies compare either policy or public responsiveness across political systems, however. Previous research has focused on a handful of countries – mostly the US, UK and Canada – that share similar cultures and electoral systems. It remains, then, for scholars to assess the opinion–policy connection across a broad range of contexts. This paper takes a first step in this direction, drawing on data from two sources: (1) public preferences for spending from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) and (2) measures of government spending from OECD spending datasets. These data permit a panel analysis of 17 countries. The article tests theories about the effects of federalism, executive–legislative imbalance, and the proportionality of electoral systems. The results provide evidence of the robustness of the ‘thermostatic’ model of opinion and policy but also the importance of political institutions as moderators of the connections between them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]