Partisan Ideology and Debt Policy Management

• In Event: Sovereign Debt, Public Perceptions, and Global Norms

Abstract

Public debt burdens were reaching historical levels before the coronavirus pandemic and have only grown larger. Efforts at consolidating this debt will likely follow in the coming years and debt burdens will grow and potentially become unstable if these stabilization efforts are delayed. This paper seeks to examine public support for such efforts to delay stabilization. We seeks to test if public support for debt reduction is driven by ideology and fixed preference or if public support is conditional on the likelihood that they will benefit from new spending by the current government. We hypothesize that individuals are more likely to support debt consolidation when they lack representatives in power because they are not likely to benefit from government spending. Further, individuals are less likely to support spending limits when they have representation in government because they will likely benefit from new spending. We test our argument with an analysis of 10 years of Eurobarometer data that include more than 600,000 respondents. Our results indicate that economic orientation has a strong effect on attitudes towards public debt. However, this concern is conditioned by the respondent’s ideological proximity to the current government.

Authors

• Matthew R. DiGiuseppe, Leiden University

• Alexander Slaski, Leiden University