The state is influenced by the preferences of the electorate. But the preferences of the electorates are also influenced by the experiences citizens have with the state. The comprehensive public support for state intervention found in the Nordic countries points to the existence of a “positive” feedback loop. The paper investigates this feedback loop by investigating attitudes towards child-care facilities and elderly-care facilities in Denmark. The premise is that especially public service production organized around universal entitlement criteria is likely to establish these “positive” feedback loops. The paper test the theses 1) that users are much more satisfied with the service production than non-users 2) that the users’ satisfaction is dependent of their experiences (measured by perceived abilities to influence the service production as well as the actual outcome from attempts to change the service production) and finally 3) that users have more stable attitudes than non-users. The paper is based in three large surveys, respectively from 1995 (N=1626), 1998 (N=1712) and 2001 (N=2972), which measured the use of child- and elderly-care facilities, perceptions of responsiveness, satisfaction, voting behavior etc. The survey material is supplemented by a media study, which measures the mass media salience of the child- and elderly-care issue in the period from 1995 to 2001.
