Political Commitment, Policy Consequences, and Moral Beliefs: Survey Evidence on the Minimum Wage

Abstract

Abstract Does information regarding the economic consequences of a minimum wage affect the level of support for or opposition to minimum wage policy? We conduct an online survey of 2242 US respondents to study this question. We randomly assign differing, empirically plausible estimates of minimum wage impacts on three outcomes—employment, the distribution of minimum wage gains to households, and comparative impacts of a government transfer program versus a minimum wage— in order to explore the relationship between minimum wage consequences and political commitment. Our results show that while political commitment is indeed influenced by information on the policy’s consequences, such information rarely leads to fundamental changes in political commitment. This is consistent with findings in the larger literature on the effects of information provision on political commitment. We offer a novel explanation for such findings by surveying respondents on their moral beliefs regarding the minimum wage, focusing on the extent to which these beliefs are consequentialist or non-consequentialist in nature. We find that non-consequentialist moral beliefs are prevalent among survey respondents and that the more intense are these beliefs, the less likely people are to be swayed by the policy’s consequences.