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Substantive Divergence: The Meaning of Public Opinion on Government Spending in Red and Blue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2020

Katherine Krimmel Open the ORCID record for Katherine Krimmel [Opens in a new window]  and
Kelly Rader Open the ORCID record for Kelly Rader [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

We examine the substantive meaning of public opinion on government spending using open-ended data from an original survey. Belying the conventional wisdom on this subject, we find that public opinion on government spending is not reducible to views on social welfare programs. While most people do have specific associations with spending, in the aggregate, public associations span a wide range of government functions. Balance does not necessarily mean harmony, however. We find strong evidence of what we call substantive divergence along party lines in this area—when they think about spending, Republicans and Democrats envision different bundles of goods and services, on average. This is true even for opposing partisans with the same overall assessment of spending (e.g., those who say government spends too much). These findings bring fiscal conflict into sharper relief and also have broader implications for the conceptualization and measurement of differences across parties, as well as other political cleavages.

Type
Article
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , September 2021 , pp. 824 - 837
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

A list of permanent links to Supplemental Materials provided by the authors precedes the References section.

*

Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/P8OYIZ

Many thanks to Bob Shapiro, Adam Berinsky, Pat Egan, Jacob Hacker, Greg Huber, Doug Kriner, Dino Christenson, Katie Einstein, David Glick, and Suzanne Mettler for feedback on our survey. Thank you to Sam Rhodes, John Henderson, David Bateman, and the participants of the Congress and History Conference for valuable comments on this project.

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Supplementary material: Link

Krimmel and Rader Dataset

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https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/P8OYIZ
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Krimmel and Rader supplementary material

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