Revealing the “Hidden welfare stateâ€: How policy information influences public attitudes about tax expenditures

Matt Guardino and Suzanne Mettler
Additional contact information
Matt Guardino: Providence College
Suzanne Mettler: Cornell University

Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, 2020, vol. 3, issue 1

Abstract: In this article, we explore how specific policy information shapes public opinion toward the “hidden welfare state†of tax expenditures. These politically and socioeconomically consequential policies—most of which bestow their greatest benefits on upper-income people—are complex and opaque, and scholars’ understanding of citizen attitudes toward them is limited. In response, we use a randomized, general population, online survey experiment to test the effects of providing people with varying amounts and kinds of information about three policies. We find that learning the basic design and rationale of key tax expenditures tends to increase public support for them. However, when informed of the distributive effects of the two policies that favor upper-income people, subjects become much less supportive of these policies. Moreover, policy-specific information appears to help subjects align their preferences with their immediate material interests. Learning the upward tilt of tax expenditures especially makes lower- and middle-income people less supportive of the policies. Our results suggest that if political elites, government administrators and news media routinely offered clear information about tax expenditures, public opinion toward the hidden welfare state would be more firmly grounded. By virtue of their design, these policies discourage public awareness of their mechanisms and distributive effects. Still, greater informational outreach regarding complicated and arcane tax expenditures could bolster public accountability for government actions that favor economically narrow and privileged segments of the population.

Keywords: Tax expenditures; Social policy; Political knowledge; Public opinion; Economic inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D90 D91 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journal-bpa.org/index.php/jbpa/article/download/108/61 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpd:articl:v:3:y:2020:i:1:jbpa.31.108

DOI: 10.30636/jbpa.31.108

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Behavioral Public Administration from Center for Experimental and Behavioral Public Administration
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sebastian Jilke ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).