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The metaphor of the public behaving as if it were a thermostat--that is, responding to increasingly liberal policies by becoming more conservative, and vice versa--was first proposed by Christopher Wlezien in his important 1995 article in the American Journal of Political Science. That model, which turns the more traditional notion of representation (opinion causes policy) on its head, reaches its fullest explication in this excellent new book by Stuart N. Soroka and Wlezien.
To be sure, the metaphor, and the entire conception of the connection between the mass public and elected officials, is inextricably tied to time; there are no representational dyads to be found in these pages. Soroka and Wlezien examine the connections between the over-time movement of public opinion and public policy across several policy domains in three countries (the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom). After an introductory chapter, they lay out their theory of the relationship between public opinion and public policy in Chapter 2. There, they clarify that the theory is not exceedingly demanding of what decades of research has shown to be a public with limited appetites and abilities to process political information. In Chapter 3, they add important comparative wrinkles to their theory, specifying two dimensions that should moderate the opinion-policy connection. The first is issue salience; the authors expect both more representation and more public responsiveness to policy on issues that are of high salience, and less of both on issues that are of low salience. (Importantly, salience can vary over time.) The second moderator is the nature of institutional arrangements in a political system. They argue that both representation and responsiveness are diminished in systems with federal (as opposed to unitary) organization and also in parliamentary (as opposed to presidential) systems.
Soroka and Wlezien lay out...