Crosscutting Preferences Over Federal Spending on Rival and Non-Rival Public Goods and Services: Measuring Citizen Ideology with Results from an Interactive Questionnaire on Public Spending Preferences

Abstract

This paper analyzes the relationship between fiscal preferences and ideology using an innovative survey methodology. An interactive questionnaire presented respondents with the President's requested budget for FY 2006 and asked them to adjust spending levels with respect to their personal preferences. By incorporating tradeoffs between spending dimensions, the responses capture the non-separable nature of the issue space and do so without compromising cardinality. As a result, each personally crafted budget has a straightforward interpretation as an ideal point. I first use the data to establish a relationship between fiscal preferences and self-reported ideology. I then perform dimensional analysis. Preferences scale to two substantive dimensions. The first measures the trade-off between security and non-security spending and is highly correlated with self-identification on the liberal-conservative dimension. The second dimension reveals a crosscutting cleavage that has attracted little, if any, attention in previous research. Specifically, it measures each respondent's relative preference for rival and non-rival government goods and services.