Does charitable giving crowd out support for government spending?

Abstract

Government spending has been shown to crowd out charitable giving. This article uses survey experiments to demonstrate that charitable giving can reciprocally crowd out support for government spending. Moreover, this crowding-out effect in public opinion varies by political ideology and by issue. In Study 1, survey respondents who were randomly assigned to read about charitable giving in a particular area were less likely to support additional taxation and government spending in that domain. This result was driven by liberals in the arts domain and moderates and conservatives in the human services domain. Study 2 leveraged data from the “Ice Bucket Challenge” to replicate this effect among very liberal respondents and show that crowding-out was attenuated when respondents perceived donations to have greater impact.