Racial Unfairness and Fiscal Politics

• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X20972102
• Author: Katherine Krimmel,Kelly Rader
• Date: 01 March 2021
• Published date: 01 March 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X20972102

American Politics Research

2021, Vol. 49(2) 143 –156

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X20972102

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Article

Public concern about federal government spending has been

a central theme of American politics in recent years. Eighty

percent of U.S. respondents told Gallup in March 2019 that

they worry about federal spending and the deficit, and large

supermajorities of respondents in major American surveys

have supported spending cuts. Asked to choose between cut-

ting spending or raising taxes as a means of reducing the

federal budget deficit, over three quarters (77%) of respon-

dents in the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study

(CCES) chose the former. Notably, support for cutting spend-

ing was also high (64%) among respondents in the 2016

General Social Survey (GSS), which did not pose a tradeoff

with taxes.1

Why is the American public so eager to reduce govern-

ment spending? Given its implications for government size

and scope, this question requires academic attention. There

have been several rich studies of the anti-spending Tea Party

that arose in the wake of the Great Recession and inaugura-

tion of Barack Obama (Arceneaux & Nicholson, 2012;

Skocpol & Williamson, 2012; Williamson, Skocpol, &

Coggin, 2011); but, research on the Tea Party can only get us

so far in understanding public demand for cutting govern-

ment spending, which is widespread among Democrats and

people of color as well as the white Republicans dispropor-

tionately found among the Tea Party’s ranks. Indeed, in the

2016 GSS, 54% of Blacks and 53% of Latinos favored cut-

ting government spending—a lower incidence than we see

among whites (68%), but still over the majority threshold.2

Similarly, a smaller percentage of Democrats (54%) than

Republicans (80%) supported spending cuts; but, this was

still the position of the median Democrat. To understand

popular support for spending cuts, a broader analysis of the

public is clearly needed.

In this paper, we develop and test a new theory of opposi-

tion to spending amongst the public at large. We argue that

perceptions of unfairness in the distribution of government

money across racial lines play an important role, not previ-

ously recognized by scholars, in driving opposition to spend-

ing in the United States. This is true for Democrats as well as

Republicans, fiscal liberals as well as conservatives, Blacks

and Latinos as well as whites.

In doing so, we build on work showing a strong relation-

ship between racial politics and views on government

spending.3 Racial resentment plays an important role in

driving Tea Party support (Skocpol & Williamson, 2012;

Williamson et al., 2011) and also predicts opposition to

spending in the public at large (Jacoby, 1994, 2000; Krimmel

& Rader, 2017).4 Indeed, these studies have shown that

views on spending are much more strongly associated with

racial resentment than with measures of economic-self

interest.5 The power of racial resentment remains strong

even when controlling for other key factors shaping views

on spending, like partisanship and ideology (Jacoby, 1994,

2000; Krimmel & Rader, 2017).6

972102APRXXX10.1177/1532673X20972102American Politics ResearchKrimmel and Rader

research-article2020

1Barnard College, New York, USA

2Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Corresponding Author:

Katherine Krimmel, Department of Political Science, Barnard College,

Columbia University, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027-6598, USA.

Email: kkrimmel@barnard.edu

Racial Unfairness and Fiscal Politics

Katherine Krimmel1 and Kelly Rader2

Abstract

We provide and test a theory explaining how and why racial attitudes shape public opinion on government spending in

the United States. We hypothesize that many people think the government allocates money unfairly across racial groups,

and “inequity aversion” leads them to reject spending as a result. Using data from an original survey, we find support for

our theory in the sample as a whole, and within racial, partisan, and ideological subgroups. Indeed, unfairness views are

comparable to partisanship in their relationship to opinion on spending. While prior work has shown that whites’ racial

attitudes are correlated with opinion on specific government programs, we show they shape opinion about the appropriate

level of government spending writ large. We also move beyond the study of white opinion, measuring views of unfairness in

the distribution of spending among racial minorities as well.

Keywords

public opinion, fiscal politics, race and politics, American politics