Do Means of Program Delivery and Distributional Consequences Affect Policy Support? Experimental Evidence About the Sour
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Do Means of Program Delivery and Distributional Consequences Affect Policy Support? Experimental Evidence About the Sources of Citizens’ Policy Opinions Vivekinan L. Ashok1 · Gregory A. Huber2,3
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract 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 the distributional consequences of these policies. In this paper, we extend this literature in two ways through a series of novel survey experiments, deployed on a nationally representative sample. First, we directly examine differences in public support for prospective government spending when manipulating the mode of delivery. Second, we examine whether information about the distributional consequences of two existing government programs affects their popularity. We find that citizens have a preference for indirect spending that is independent of the distributional consequences of a given policy and identify mechanisms that may explain this view. Furthermore, we find little evidence that highlighting the regressive effects of current government programs significantly reduces the demand for their policy benefits. Our findings have implications for understanding the political calculus of policy design and the potential for public persuasion. Keywords Government spending · Public opinion · Policy design
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1110 9-019-09534-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Gregory A. Huber [email protected] Vivekinan L. Ashok [email protected] 1
Department of Government, Cornell University, 214 White Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
2
Department of Political Science, Yale University, New Haven, USA
3
Institution for Social and Policy Studies, 77 Prospect St., New Haven, CT 06511, USA
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Political Behavior
Why are some government benefits transferred directly to citizens—in the form of a check or debit card—while others are passed indirectly through the tax code? Does the method of delivery have implications for a program’s survival? Analysts have noted that many redistributive policies, such as welfare and food stamps, are delivered directly to citizens, while others that tend to benefit higher income groups, such as the home mortgage interest deduction, are delivered indirectly.1 One important theoretical explanation for this difference is that indirect delivery may allow politicians to obscure or “submerge” regressive government spending that would otherwise not survive public scrutiny, while more popular and progressive programs are delivered directly. How policies are delivered therefore has implications for their visibility and political survival. While this perspective is theoretically intriguing, there are multiple challenges to this account. For one, many of the mostly overtly redistributive programs that ar
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