Are Tax Cuts Supporters Self-Interested and/or Partisan? The Case of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act

• Date: 01 May 2022
• Published date: 01 May 2022
• Author: Marco Mendoza Aviña,André Blais
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211041147
• Subject Matter: Articles

2022, Vol. 50(3) 416 –427

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X211041147

American Politics Research

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211041147

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Article

Introduction

In late 2017, the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act ignited

concerns about economic and political inequality (Bartels,

2017; Hacker & Pierson, 2017). The law’s main objective

was to reduce the tax burdens of corporations and wealthy

individuals (Gale et al., 2018). The ensuing “massive tax

relief” (The White House, 2017) proved popular with the

Republican base, but not so much with the rest of the country

(Newport, 2019; Williamson, 2018). Still, around 40% of

voters favored a reform that primarily benefited the top 1%

(Scott & Chang, 2017). Why did so many people approve of

a policy from which they stood very little to gain?

Despite rising levels of inequality—and public discon-

tent with inequality—political support for redistributive

policy remains stagnant (Bartels, 2008; Erikson, 2015;

Scheve & Stasavage, 2016). In the past two decades, citi-

zens have tended to reject progressive taxation (Boudreau

& MacKenzie, 2018; Franko et al., 2013) and even

embrace regressive tax reforms (Bartels, 2005; Krupnikov

et al., 2006; Lupia et al., 2007; Slemrod, 2006). This is

puzzling, as research on fiscal policy preferences shows

widespread support for the principles of tax fairness and

progressivity (Ballard-Rosa et al., 2017; Stantcheva,

2020) as well as redistributive programs targeting the

poor (Piston, 2018).

In this article, we elucidate public opinion about the Tax

Cuts and Jobs Act by bridging self-interest and partisanship,

two complementary sources of influence.1 We show that

personal financial considerations shape support for the tax

cuts, but only among Republicans. Furthermore, a third fac-

tor, political sophistication, produces two opposite patterns

of heterogeneity. Our analyses leverage the 2018 Cooperative

Congressional Election Study and a policy-focused measure

of public support for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. We also

replicate our results using alternative measures of approval

from two separate electoral studies conducted after the 2018

midterm elections. This allows us to validate our hypotheses

on more than one dataset and with conceptually distinct

measures of public opinion, ensuring the robustness of our

findings.

The rest of this paper is structured as follows. We first

provide background on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and its

distributional impact. We then present the literature on pub-

lic preferences for tax policy, before developing hypotheses

1041147

APRXXX10.1177/1532673X211041147American Politics ResearchMendoza Aviña and Blais

research-article

2021

1University of Montreal, QC, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Marco Mendoza Aviña, University of Montreal, 3150 Rue Jean-Brillant,

Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, Montreal, QC H3T 1N8, Canada.

Email: marco.mendoza.avina@umontreal.ca

Are Tax Cuts Supporters Self-Interested

and/or Partisan? The Case of the

Tax Cuts and Jobs Act

Marco Mendoza Aviña1 and André Blais1

Abstract

In late 2017, the first unified Republican government in 15 years enacted the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which cut taxes

for corporations and the wealthy. Why did so many citizens support a policy that primarily benefited people richer than

them? The self-interest hypothesis holds that individuals act upon the position they occupy in the income distribution:

richer (poorer) taxpayers should favor (oppose) regressive policy. Associations between income and policy preferences are

often inconsistent, however, suggesting that many citizens fail to connect their self-interest to taxation. Indeed, political

psychologists have shown compellingly that citizens can be guided by partisan considerations not necessarily aligned with

their own interests. This article assesses public support for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Using data from the 2018

Cooperative Congressional Election Study as well as contemporaneous ANES and VOTER surveys to replicate our analyses,

we show that self-interest and partisanship both come into play, but that partisanship matters more. Personal financial

considerations, while less influential than party identification, are relevant for two groups of individuals: Republicans and the

politically unsophisticated.

Keywords

Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, self-interest, partisanship, political sophistication, public opinion