Policy Visibility and Citizen Demand for Government Activity

• In Event: Making Commitments, Breaking Commitments; The Political Economy of Governance

Abstract

The lack of support for greater redistributive government spending puzzles many political scientists, some of whom argue that support for spending is suppressed because citizens do not recognize many of the benefits they receive from government. In this line of argument, recent scholarship argues that citizens’ support for specific government programs in the United States is affected by the means through which benefits are delivered as well as distributional consequences of these policies. In this paper, we extend this literature in two ways. First, we directly examine differences in public support when separately manipulating information about distributional consequences and mode of government delivery. Second, we examine whether policy design has a “spillover” effect, changing broader demand for government activity. For these analyses, we conduct a novel survey experiment that manipulates the way in which benefits from two popular government programs are transferred to citizens before measuring preferences regarding the size and scope of government. Additionally, we identify the added effect of economic self-interest on our main outcomes and present evidence about the underlying mechanisms that may explain our results.

Authors

• Vivekinan Ashok, Yale University

• Gregory Huber, Yale University