Measuring Budgetary Preferences Using Interactive Budget Simulations

• In Event: Budgets and Attitudes Toward Economic Policy

Abstract

The literature on budget preferences has become increasingly bifurcated with scholars studying preferences over spending and revenue as separate outcomes of interest. Certainly, this substantive divide has led to important advancements in explaining specific questions related to each side of the ledger, but research designs focusing on only one side of the ledger have come at a theoretical and empirical cost. In this paper, we argue that a holistic approach, accounting for spending and revenue preferences, can overcome several existing issues found in the literature. Yet, a major barrier to studying budget preferences in this way lies with traditional methods, such as survey questionnaires. We introduce online interactive budget tools as a flexible, multi-purpose method for scholars to collect attitudinal measures on spending and revenue items. One limitation to the singular approach is it encourages respondents to take more extreme positions on taxes and spending, such as low tax rates and high levels of public spending. In this article, we test whether the holistic approach indeed renders more moderate budgetary preferences than the singular approach using data from a 2019 Mechanical Turk survey with an embedded budget tool and a controlled experiment.

Authors

• Kim-Lee Tuxhorn, University of Calgary

• John W. D'Attoma, University of Exeter

• Sven Steinmo, University of Colorado