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The relationship between government policy and public preferences is a core concern of democratic theorists. One particularly powerful method of relating policy to opinion is the 'dynamic representation' approach. Scholars in this tradition test to what extent current policy changes are a function of past public preferences. This paper derives hypotheses from the dynamic representation approach and tests them for the United Kingdom in a left-right context from 1976-2006. First, it is shown that government policy on the left-right scale changes as a consequence of changing public preferences (the direct mechanism of 'rational anticipation'). Second, a right-wing public results in the election of the Conservative Party, which consequently pursues right-wing policies in office (the indirect mechanism of 'electoral turnover'). Third, government responsiveness is found to be conditional on electoral vulnerability. Popular incumbents are less likely than unpopular incumbents to adjust their policy position to the public. While the Westminster system has received much criticism for its failure to reliably link rulers to the ruled, this paper finds that dynamic representation on the left-right scale in the United Kingdom functions quite admirably. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and why do the policy positions of parties change? We have good theoretical reasons to expect that political parties adopt policy positions in response to the preferences of voters, since voters are likely to prefer parties that have ideological positions that most resemble their own. At the aggregate level, this leads to the prediction that parties shift their positions towards the median voter's bliss point. Extensive research has documented that parties adjust their ideological position in response to public opinion shifts. Yet, such empirical research has tended to lack sufficiently long time-series of party positions to systematically examine the dynamics of party positions over time. This leaves a number of questions still to be further explored, such as: when do parties shift their ideological positions? Are parties more responsive to the median voter or to party supporters? Does the responsiveness of parties to voters depend on the electoral cycle? This paper examines these questions using time-series data on party leader positions from 1973-2008 in Denmark and Britain. We find that party leaders adjust their positions in the direction of the median voter, and that the extent of this adjustment is greater in election years. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many studies have examined the economic status of immigrants, most studies of immigration have neglected immigrant opinions. When immigration is addressed at all using survey data, studies almost exclusively focus on native attitudes toward immigration and not on attitudes of immigrants themselves. In this paper, we investigate whether immigrants and natives have systematically different attitudes toward social spending and redistribution. We employ surveys from Germany and Great Britain that sample a relatively large number of immigrants compared to typical national election surveys. In addressing this potential “opinion gap,” we control for socioeconomic characteristics, such as income and education as well as immigrants’ ability to assimilate into their new country’s labor market by comparing an immigrant’s skill level with his or her actual occupation in the new country. We also include contextual covariates to account for potential network effects. Our statistical analyses use ordered logistical regressions and are fully interactive (following Franzese 1999), consistent with our theoretical expectation that the models’ independent variables affect natives differently than they do immigrants. Once these controls are included, we observe that immigrants are never more likely than natives to favor increases in social spending or to endorse redistributive measures. In instances where we do find a significant opinion gap between natives and immigrants, the latter tend to support more conservative positions, favoring tax cuts at the expense of social spending. While some of our findings are preliminary in nature, they nevertheless represent a significant contribution to the extant literature, which, to our knowledge, does not include comparative studies on the political attitudes of immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines and compares occasions when foreign/defense policy has become atypically salient in British Public opinion by examining public opinion data on the Suez crisis, the Falklands war, the Gulf War, Kossovo, and the Iraq war. Our preliminary finding is that these issues are not generally seen as significant by UK voters, but surge to the fore in crisis periods, usually, but not always, to the benefit of the government of the day. The effect on public opinion tends to be short-term however, and foreign policy has not been a decisive issue in recent British General elections [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is the public affected by terrorist attacks? Numerous scholars have posited that the public typically overreacts to threats, others contend that the public is rational in its opinions. In this paper, the role of the public in post-terror attack civil liberty abridgements will be discussed. In the end, it will be shown, through studying public opinion polls from the US, UK and Israel, that public fear levels jump up after terrorist attacks and that this jump is concomitant with a demand for action. The public is also more willing to cede liberties after attacks. These factors create an opportunity for the executive to act. However, public fears and the willingness to trade liberties-for-security fade, or decay, over time, thus eventually constraining executive action. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [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 these questions. 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, elite cues, 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 and add to the growing literature on elite cueing or manipulation of ethnic differences for political gains. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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British public opinion data are used to investigate models of public opinion about responses to terrorist attacks. Model selection and encompassing tests are used to compare rival morality, benefits-costs, and general heuristic models. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impact of terrorism in the U.S., UK and Israel on public opinions from 1979?2004. Does terrorism have a debilitating impact on a country?s morale or do attacks rally the public? Do the characteristics of an attack lead to differential impacts? ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]