Policy Sentiment in the UK

Stuart N. Soroka for providing me their data on attitudes toward government spending in the UK. 1 In this paper I lay out a concept of policy sentiment as an under-lying attitude explaining observed respondent preferences on policy preference questions. The latent concept, left vs. right sentiment, is extracted from policy preference marginals. The extracted time series characterizes the last 45 years of UK political experience. Two analy-ses focus on the causes of policy sentiment—thermostatic response to eras of party government—and its consequences for aggregate election outcomes in the UK. 2 1 Policy Sentiment: The Concept Mass publics get to choose, in surveys directly and in politics indirectly