Deficit spending is consistently unpopular on all sides of the political spectrum, regardless of the current debt or deficit size – recent research proves.

If partisans reason about the importance of government overspending in a biased fashion, as per H1, the change in presidential administrations should spur changes in partisans’ perceived importance of addressing the deficit. Specifically, according to H1a and H1b, the change from the Obama Administration to Trump Administration should result in lower perceived importance of the deficit among Republicans and greater perceived importance of the deficit among Democrats, respectively.

To test these expectations using the PRC data, we specified a logistic regression model featuring an interaction between a trichotomous categorical measure of party identification (Democrat, Independent, or Republican) and the year of the survey (0 = 2016, 1 = 2018). To account for any potential imbalances between the two samples, we also included controls for respondents’ age, family income, education level, gender identification, racial identification, and ideological self-placement.

The results of this analysis are featured in the top panel of Fig. . The y-axis displays the marginal effect of changing from the Obama Administration (i.e., the 2016 survey) to the Trump Administration (i.e., the 2018 survey) on the probability of identifying “reducing the deficit” as a top public policy priority. For Republicans, moving from the Obama Administration to the Trump Administration predicts a more than 12 percentage-point reduction in the probability of identifying deficit reduction as a top priority (p < 0.01). Remarkably, we observe this effect despite only two years having elapsed since the first survey and, perhaps even more importantly, the fact that the budget deficit had actually increased each fiscal year, resulting in an even larger national debt in 2018 than in 2016.

In contrast, among Democrats, Fig.  shows the estimated effect to be nearly zero (p = 0.94), indicating essentially no change in perceived importance of deficits compared to 2016. The same is true of Independents, who exhibited a small, non-significant negative effect (p = 0.81). Thus, Fig.  provides additional evidence for H1a, though, in contrast to the experimental results, no evidence for H1b.

We employ a similar methodological approach in examining the VSG panel data. Specifically, we specified a logistic regression model featuring an interaction between a trichotomous categorical measure of party identification (measured in 2016, the baseline wave) and a categorical measure of the three survey waves (2016, 2017, and 2019), with standard errors clustered by respondent.

Panel B of Fig.  displays the results of this analysis. Like Panel A, the y-axis in Panel B indicates the marginal effect of changing from the Obama to Trump administrations on the probability of identifying the budget deficit as a “Very important” issue. Beginning first with the effect of moving from the baseline year (2016) to 2017 (indicated by the hollow circles), we see that Republicans show a significant decrease in perceived importance, on the order of 3 percentage points (p < 0.001). Democrats, on the other hand, again showed a near-zero change in perceived importance of the deficit (p = 0.63). However, if we treat Independents essentially as a baseline (given that they have less reason to engage in partisan-motivated reasoning), it implies that the negative effect observed among Republicans in 2017 was not due to partisan bias but, perhaps, to other non-partisan considerations that were also on the minds of political Independents.

Far more dramatic, however, are the results for 2019 (indicated by the “x” symbols in Fig. ). While we observe essentially the same result among Independents, we see that, compared to 2016, the probability that Republicans viewed the deficit as “Very important” decreased by more than 13 percentage points (p < 0.001). In this case, however, we also observe a marked increase in perceived deficit importance among Democrats, and of nearly identical magnitude: over the same span of time, Democrats exhibited a nearly 12 percentage-point increase in perceived deficit importance (p < 0.001). These patterns are precisely in line with both H1a and H1b, respectively, and strongly suggests partisan bias shapes beliefs about the importance of addressing the federal deficit, both among both Republicans and Democrats.

Thus, across the PRC and VSG data sets, we find strong evidence in support of H1. It is important to emphasize, again, that over the time frame we analyzed, both deficits and the total amount of government debt increased. This renders the existence of partisan bias all the more notable—perhaps especially in the case of Republicans, who clearly decreased perceived importance—insofar as it requires, at least to some extent, disregard for changes in objective reality. These findings therefore also accord with those of Crosby and Holbrook (), who find that public support for a balanced budget amendment is not significantly related to the actual size of deficits or levels of debt.

In sum, our experimental results above demonstrate that even without explicit cues from partisan elites, partisans in the mass public can reason about the importance of deficit spending in a biased fashion. Notably, the results of our observational studies display even larger effects than did our experiments. This may potentially be because elite partisan cues are also present, further fueling biases among partisans in the mass public. Thus, the observational data analyses raise the question of whether partisan news media might elevate (or downplay) government overspending as an important issue.