ABSTRACT
Democratic accountability and control require that people are reasonably well-informed about what policymakers do. Consider that an uninformed public is unable to hold policy-makers accountable. Policymakers would have little incentive to represent what the public wants in policy - there would be no real benefit for doing so and no real cost for not doing so. The thermostatic model of opinion and policy consists of two equations, one for public responsiveness to policy and the other for policy representation of opinion. Negative feedback of policy on preferences is the fundamental feature of the thermostatic model. It is what distinguishes a reasonably informed public - one that knows something about what policymakers actually do - from an uninformed public. The original statement of the thermostatic model focused on dynamics of spending preferences, and much of the ensuing research has as well.
