Abstract
Do liberals and conservatives who trust the government have more similar preferences regarding the federal budget than liberals and conservatives who do not? Prior research has shown that the ideological gap over spending increases and tax cuts narrows at high levels of trust in government. We extend this literature by examining whether the dampening effect of trust operates when more difficult budgetary decisions (spending cuts and tax increases) have to be made. Although related, a tax increase demands greater material and ideological sacrifice from individuals than tax cuts. The same logic can be applied to support for spending cuts. We test the trust-as-heuristic hypothesis using measures of revealed budgetary preferences from a population-based survey containing an embedded budget simulation. Our findings show that trusting liberals and conservatives share similar preferences toward spending cuts and tax increases, adding an important empirical addendum to a theory based on sacrificial costs.
Highlights
Do liberals and conservatives who trust the government have more similar preferences regarding the federal budget than liberals and conservatives who do not? Prior research has shown that the ideological gap over spending increases and tax cuts narrows at high levels of trust in government
5 We modeled our seven-point ideology identification question after the ANES, “When it comes to politics, do you think of yourself as: very liberal, liberal, somewhat liberal, moderate or middle of the road, somewhat conservative, conservative, or very conservative?” We label this variable as Liberal, with higher values indicating more liberal
On the spending side (Table 1, column 1), our results show that liberals (-0.664) are less likely to cut spending items compared to moderates while conservatives (0.303) are more likely to cut spending
Summary
Do liberals and conservatives who trust the government have more similar preferences regarding the federal budget than liberals and conservatives who do not? Prior research has shown that the ideological gap over spending increases and tax cuts narrows at high levels of trust in government. We ask: Do liberals and conservatives who trust the government have more similar preferences regarding spending cuts and tax increases than those with less trust in government?
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