Thursday, July 13, 2017
WMB - Gannochy Seminar Room 3 (University of Glasgow)
Fiscal policies are not only a crucial tool for influencing the macroeconomic trajectory of countries, but they also have significant distributive consequences for individual citizens. While citizens benefit from a large amount of government spending, they also pay for most of this spending through direct and indirect taxation. Consequently, fiscal policies are a constant source of political contestation in democratic states, as politicians attempt to appeal to their voters. However, despite living in times of “permanent austerity” (Pierson 1994), we know surprisingly little about the public preferences towards fiscal policies. In particular, the existing literature cannot account for the trade-offs that are inherent in designing government budgets. Most prior research studies preferences towards fiscal policies on a single dimension that is independent from other aspects of the government’s budget. This conception is unrealistic and risks misrepresenting the underlying preferences that citizens have towards fiscal policies. In this paper, we attempt to capture the multi-dimensionality of fiscal policies by using original conjoint survey experiments in four countries (Germany, Italy, Spain, UK) that isolate attitudes towards different aspects of government budgets (including taxation, government spending, and budget deficits). Disentangling the preferences towards different elements of fiscal policy in this ways allows us to analyse the priorities that citizens have with respect to government budgets.
