Public Opinion Quarterly Volume 65:550–561  2001 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research All rights reserved. 0033-362X/2001/6504-0004$02.50 IDEOLOGICAL PLACEMENTS AND POLITICAL JUDGMENTS OF GOVERNMENT INSTITUTIONS CHRISTOPHER WLEZIEN University of Oxford CHRISTOPHER CARMAN University of Pittsburgh The representation of public preferences in public policy is fundamental to most conceptions of democracy. Indeed, if only because of the threat of electoral sanction, politicians are expected to “respond” to public preferences. This expectation is evident throughout the literature on democratic politics, and there is a large (and growing) body of research that demonstrates a correspondence between public preferences and policy behavior (see, e.g., Bartels 1991; Erikson, Wright, and McIver 1993; Jacobs 1993; Miller and Stokes 1963; Monroe 1979; Page and Shapiro 1992; Stimson, MacKuen, and Erikson 1995; Weissberg 1976; Wlezien 1996; Wood and Hinton-Andersson 1998). Some of the research (esp. Stimson, MacKuen, and Erikson 1995; Wlezien 1996) suggests that government institutions, including nonelected ones such as the Supreme Court, actually respond to changing preferences over time. In theory, representation of this sort presumes that voters have meaningful preferences for policy, that they acquire information about the behavior of government institutions, and that they actually use this information when making political judgments. Otherwise, political actors would have little in- centive to represent what the public wants. 1 Recent research indicates that the public has meaningful preferences for policy, at least in certain domains, and Earlier versions of the this article were presented at the 1999 meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, and the Southern Political Science Association, Savannah, GA, and the 2000 Meeting of the Southwest Political Science Association, Galveston, TX. Portions of the results contained herein originally were included in a 1997 Pilot Study Report prepared for the American National Election Studies (February 1998). The authors thank John Mark Hansen, William Jacoby, Kathleen Knight, Brad McKay, Keith Poole, Vincent Price, Virginia Sapiro, Robert Stein, Laura Stoker, and the anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions. 1. Of course, effective democratic accountability and control also presume that political actors are interested in reelection or in satisfying the public for other reasons.