Replication Data for: What Moves (Spending) Mood? The Nature and Origins of Parallel Public Preferences

Existing studies suggest issue preferences move together – in parallel – over time. Although the existence of a “mood” is increasingly clear in various countries, the determinants of such parallel movement remain unexplained. We identify four mechanisms: (1) parallel movement in preferred policy levels across domains; (2) parallel movement in actual policy across domains together with thermostatic feedback within each domain; (3) thermostatic feedback within each domain to global policy across domains, and (4) thermostatic responsiveness to the party of the president. Understanding which of these factors are at work and to what extent is important, as the patterns structure our interpretations of public opinion change and policy responsiveness itself. Our study develops and begins to test the encompassing theoretical model, focusing on a set of four social spending domains in the United States of America. We find evidence that the dynamics of spending mood reflect parallelism in the underlying preferred levels of policy and in the responsiveness to total social spending and also to the party of the president.