Deficit spending is highly unpopular among American elected officials’ voter bases – unlikely to support its implementation.
Bremer and BÜRGISSER 22 (BJÖRN BREMER, BJÖRN BREMER is a Senior Researcher in Comparative and International Political Economy at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG) in Cologne. Previously, he completed a PhD in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. At the EUI, he was also a researcher in the POLCON project. Prior to his Ph.D., he studied at UWC Atlantic College and obtained a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) from the University of Oxford and an MA in International Relations and International Economics from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. His main research interests lie at the intersection of political economy, comparative politics, and political behavior. In his PhD, he studied the fiscal policies of social democratic parties in the context of the Great Recession. Reto Bürgisser, Reto Bürgisser is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science, University of Zurich. Prior to joining the IPZ, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern. He holds a Ph.D. from the European University Institute. He works at the intersection of political economy, comparative politics, and political behavior, and is particularly interested in the politics of welfare state and labor market reforms, fiscal and environmental policy preferences, technological change, and growth models. In his Ph.D., he has studied the politics of welfare state recalibration in Continental and Southern Europe over the last three decades. Currently, he is part of the NORFACE TECHNO and the ERC Welfare Priorities projects and co-organizes the Zurich Political Economy Seminar Series. 1-11-2022, accessed on 6-28-2023, European Journal of Political Research, “Do citizens care about government debt? Evidence from survey experiments on budgetary priorities”, https://ejpr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1475-6765.12505.)
While macroeconomic policies were long considered part of the technocratic realm of ‘quiet politics’ (Culpepper, ), they have moved into the electoral realm of ‘noisy politics’ over the last decade. The cumulative impact of the financial crisis, the eurozone crisis and the pandemic on Europe's economies has been unprecedented. Public debt has substantially increased, and the politicization of public debt and fiscal consolidation will likely accelerate yet again, once short-term emergency measures to combat the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic are over. Consequently, governments will be confronted with tough fiscal policy choices, further exacerbating political conflict over fiscal policies.
In this context, it is vital to understand citizens' fiscal policy preferences. To what extent do they care about debt? A large body of research finds that government debt is unpopular and fiscal consolidation is broadly in line with public opinion. According to this view, citizens are fiscal conservatives, who dislike government debt and support balanced budgets (e.g., Alesina et al., ; Arias & Stasavage, ; Bansak et al., ; Barnes & Hicks, , ; Brender & Drazen, ; Giger & Nelson, ; Peltzman, ). In contrast, other research suggests that citizens punish governments for implementing fiscal consolidation. According to this view, voters oppose spending cuts and tax increases, which reduce the popularity of governments, harm the re-election chances of incumbents and contribute to the success of populist parties (Bojar et al., ; Fetzer, ; Galofré-Vilà et al., ; Hübscher & Sattler, ; Hübscher et al., ; Jacques & Haffert, ; Talving, ).