ORIGINAL PAPER
Public Attitudes Toward Social Spending in the United
States: The Differences Between Direct Spending
and Tax Expenditures
Christopher Faricy
•
Christopher Ellis
Published online: 24 March 2013
Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract This paper uses a survey experiment to examine differences in public
attitudes toward ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ government spending. Federal social welfare
spending in the USA has two components: the federal government spends money to
directly provide social benefits to citizens, and also indirectly subsidizes the private
provision of social benefits through tax expenditures. Though benefits provided
through tax expenditures are considered spending for budgetary purposes, they
differ from direct spending in several ways: in the mechanisms through which
benefits are delivered to citizens, in how they distribute wealth across the income
spectrum, and in the visibility of their policy consequences to the mass public. We
develop and test a model explaining how these differences will affect public atti-
tudes toward spending conducted through direct and indirect means. We find that
support for otherwise identical social programs is generally higher when such
programs are portrayed as being delivered through tax expenditures than when they
are portrayed as being delivered by direct spending. In addition, support for tax
expenditure programs which redistribute wealth upward drops when citizens are
provided information about the redistributive effects. Both of these results are
conditioned by partisanship, with the opinions of Republicans more sensitive to the
mechanism through which benefits are delivered, and the opinions of Democrats
more sensitive to information about their redistributive effects.
Keywords Government spending Á Social policy Á Social welfare Á Public opinion
C. Faricy
Syracuse University, 100 Eggers Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA
C. Ellis (&)
Bucknell University, Moore Avenue, Lewisburg, PA 17837, USA
e-mail: cre008@bucknell.edu
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Polit Behav (2014) 36:53–76
DOI 10.1007/s11109-013-9225-5