The more things change... Government, The Economy and Public Services since the 1970s

The economy remains a fundamental driver of views of government. This is not so much actual economic indicators or even economic optimism, but ratings of the competence of economic management. However, we need to be careful not to simplify the relationship, as ratings of economic management are likely to at least partly be determined by political sympathies;

In any case, events of all sorts intervene in ratings of governments, and wars in particular still have a strong (positive or negative) effect;

The Major Government provides a whole series of exceptions, achieving record levels of unpopularity in record time, and never recovering;

The current Government did enjoy a longer and more notable honeymoon than we have seen in the recent past, but their popularity is now at a remarkably similar level to Mrs Thatcher's Government in the middle of its second term. The key question is whether they continue with their unusually steep decline in popularity, or lock on to the more usual, gradual decline experienced by Conservative governments in the 80s and 90s;

The issues that most concern the public at the moment are public services a very different situation from the 1970s and 1980s;

160While the government does seem to get credit for sound economic management, and the blame when things go wrong, the available data suggests the relationship between views of public services and views of government is weak. So even if the public does notice that services are delivering, it may not directly improve their views of the government;

In general older people are less critical than younger people, and looking at longterm trends this seems likely to continue160after a certain age we seem to get happier with public services and life in general (or we expect less). In fact, there are hardly any fundamental shifts in views of government or public services between recent generations with the most worrying exception being the more negative views towards the police among the current generation of young people.

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