American public policy today is characterized by indirect governance -- the delivery of benefits to individuals and other entities through mechanisms such as tax breaks or loan guarantees rather than direct payments. Existing scholarship argues that citizens react to and evaluate indirect benefit programs differently than they do traditional direct spending programs, even though they may produce identical benefits. Still, scholars have yet to articulate and rigorously test alternative theoretical accounts to explain why citizens perceive these programs differently. Why would the mechanism of delivery shape citizen perceptions of government programs?
This project investigates the apparent public bias in favor of indirect programs, with an explicit focus on citizens' perception of benefits delivered through the tax code. It elaborates a series of hypotheses based on framing effects, and tests them through a set of survey experiments that manipulate the delivery method and other aspects of described public policies.
The project meets NSF's intellectual merit criterion in several ways. First, it engages and contributes to several relevant and emerging areas of political science, ranging from American political economy to public opinion and policy analysis. Second, the project is methodologically rigorous in that it uses an experimental design to make reliable causal inferences, avoiding the pitfalls of omitted variable bias that plague observational research designs. Third, the project is innovative in the way that it employs this approach to rigorously test arguments about variation in public perceptions of public policies. Fourth, the results of several earlier pilot studies demonstrate the feasibility of the project.
The project also has significant broader impact beyond academia. Citizens' understanding of and reactions to government policies are central to any modern democracy, but we know surprisingly little about exactly how these processes work. The findings of this project will be of interest to both scholars of and practitioners in the policy process. Already, several journalists, policy practitioners and others outside of the discipline of political science have expressed interest in the preliminary findings of this study, indicating its potential to contribute to public understanding of the implications of policy design. Finally, given the current political momentum to revise the nation's tax code, the delivery of policy through tax expenditures has become a salient element of debates about tax reform. Understanding the forces that shape citizen views about indirect government programs will shed important light on the political feasibility and impact of potential tax reforms.
