What do people want the government to do? What governmental policies would make the people happy? Questions such as these are apropos in a democracy because public satisfaction, as opposed to the satisfaction of, say, a haughty, distant, and self-serving monarch, is the key goal of democratic governance. The answer to the questions seems obvious, if difficult to achieve – satisfaction increases when governmental policies approximate the policies preferred by the people – and a substantial literature has developed investigating the connection between popular satisfaction with government and the policies government produces. In this chapter, we review much of this literature, but the purpose of this review is to show that, despite the idea's intuitive appeal, people's satisfaction with government is not driven mainly by whether or not they are getting the policies they want – partially yes, but mainly no. Policies and issues are frequently and surprisingly unable to explain variation in people's satisfaction with government. Others have questioned the importance in American politics of the people's issue positions, and we borrow much from them while adding some new evidence of our own.

Theoretically, it is possible to ascertain people's preferences in each and every policy area on the governmental agenda. To measure policy preferences, analysts often present policy options on spectra (rather than as forced-choice dichotomies). For example, a spectrum could run, as it does in the top half of Figure 1.1, from massive cuts in defense spending through a middle ground of no change in current spending levels all the way to massive increases.