What Forms of Redistribution Do Americans Want? Understanding Preferences for Policy Benefit-Cost Tradeoffs

• Published date: 01 December 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129241260413
• Author: Sam Zacher
• Date: 01 December 2024

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(4) 1146–1163

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129241260413

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What Forms of Redistribution Do

Americans Want? Understanding

Preferences for Policy Benef‌it-Cost

Tradeoffs

Sam Zacher

1



Abstract

Political scientists agree that most Americans are “operationally liberal.”However, economic preferences have tra-

ditionally been measured as opinions on public spending, independent from the “costs”of public policies. In reality,

redistributive economic policies often impose costs on some actors while delivering benef‌its to others. When a policy ’s

costs and benef‌its are both apparent, what types of redistribution do Americans prefer? This paper’s novel survey

evidence shows that preferences for policy benef‌its are indeed sensitive to which subgroupswould bear the policy’s

costs (and vice versa). American majorities do support a wide range of redistributive economic policy packages—as long

as the wealthy are footing the bill or the costs are hidden. When the size of the group facing the policy cost (e.g.,tax)

increases, overall support declines. Preference differences between Republicans of varyi ng economic statuses are large,

while divisions within the Democratic coalition are subtler but still clear on certain policies. Overall, this paper shows

that measuring preferences for a policy’s costs (e.g., taxation) are crucial to truly understanding voters’holistic econom ic

policy demands. Further, the lack of enactment by political elites of the forms of redistribution consistently supported by

the public casts research on democratic representation in new light.

Keywords

public opinion, public policy, economic policy, taxation, redistribution, preference measurement

Introduction

When it comes to the provision of public goods, do

Americans “want something for nothing”?Citrin (1979)

posed this question, arguing that Americans may dislike

tax increases—and may f‌ight to cut taxes—but they still

generally want the government to deliver material ben-

ef‌its. Since then, countless political scientists have

demonstrated that Americans support enhanced govern-

ment spending across many policy areas (e.g., Ellis and

Stimson, 2012). However, more recent work has shown

that people generally want lower taxes on themselves

(Ballard-Rosa, Martin, and Scheve, 2017;Bartels, 2005)

and appear to less intensely prefer reforming tax policies

compared to other issues (Sides, Tausanovitch, and

Vavrek, 2022).

How Americans trade off potential benef‌its versus

costs of economic policies remains unclear. When faced

with the chance to expand public benef‌its that are f‌inanced

by specif‌ic tax increases, do voters still support left-

leaning economic policies? Which types of taxes do

Americans prefer raising to fund which sorts of enhanced

government spending or economic regulation? Existing

empirical evidence has shown that voters (separately)

favor public spending and have mixed preferences on

taxation. When political elites are faced with policy de-

cisions, their choices to expand public benef‌its often

involve imposing costs on certain actors, too, via taxation,

regulation, or cutting other benef‌its. While the visible

politics of redistribution may sometimes solely focus on

the benef‌its of a policy change, the policy’s costs—even if

1

Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Corresponding Author:

Sam Zacher, Yale University, 5820 Marmion Way Unit 321, New

Haven, CT, USA.

Email: sam.zacher@yale.edu

hidden—are always relevant to the politics of the issue, as

the degree of (un)popularity of the potential costs de-

termines how the policy’s opponents can stir up oppo-

sition to the policy.

1

Which holistic redistributive

economic policies that Americans do and do not prefer

remains untested.

What we know about Americans’preferences for

economic policies to this point is based on survey data

regarding proposals to either expand public spending or

(less often) increase taxation. Using a novel survey of

Americans, I transcend this limitation by eliciting pref-

erences for an array of economic policies, separately

measuring views on various tax policies (“costs”), various

kinds of increased public spending or regulatory changes

that would redistribute resources (“benef‌its”), and—

crucially—certain “bundled”combinations of policy

costs and benef‌its. This survey design allows for under-

standing which holistic economic policies (that combine

benef‌its and costs) are supported or opposed by majorities

and by certain American subgroups.

Results indicate that preferences for policies that

“bundle”benef‌its and costs together differ substantially

from preferences for policies that would only deliver

“isolated”benef‌its or impose isolated costs. I specif‌ically

show that support for policy benef‌its (or costs) can differ

by 17 to 23 percentage points, depending on the cost (or

benef‌it) with which they are tied. This is extremely

substantial variation. While previous prominent literature

(e.g., Ansolabehere, Rodden, and Snyder, 2006;

Broockman and Malhotra, 2020;Ellis and Stimson, 2012)

f‌inds that most people support a range of public benef‌it

expansions, this paper’sf‌indings show that Americans

only support those policies under certain kinds of policy

cost scenarios.

2

I substantively show that majorities (and even super-

majorities) of Americans support expansions to govern-

ment funding and public authority across an array of

policy areas—as long as the wealthy (i.e., family incomes

above $1 million) are paying the taxes to fund such

enhancements. To this point, academic understanding of

public support for these kinds of policies has been unclear,

since existing research on economic policy preferences is

based on separate, isolated preferences for public benef‌its

versus taxation. Two additional f‌indings from this paper’s

original research design are that Americans are generally

unsupportive of expanded public services if taxes on all

income levels would have to increase, and Americans are

tepidly supportive of raising taxes on the broadly aff‌luent

(i.e., family incomes above $200,000) to fund an ex-

panded state.

The secondary f‌indings of this paper center the rela-

tionship between self-interest and preferences for bundled

redistributive policies. This original, innovative survey

design yields novel f‌indings: The preferences of aff‌luent

Americans are more sensitive to the types of progressive

tax policies combined with expanded benef‌its. I also hone

in on the relationship between economic status, partisan

aff‌iliation, and preferences for redistribution because the

socioeconomic class bases of both party voting coalitions

have expanded over recent decades (e.g., Kitschelt and

Rehm, 2019).

3

Republican voters’preference differences

by economic status over redistribution are big and ob-

vious, while divisions among Democrats are less frequent

but still apparent on policy bundles that would impose

more direct costs on aff‌luent Democrats.

This paper’s novel, empirically driven arguments are

two-fold. First, Americans’preferences for redistributive

economic benef‌its (or costs) are highly sensitive to the

type of policy cost (or benef‌it) with which they are

combined. Existing research correctly argues that

Americans support various enhanced government pro-

grams, but given this paper’sf‌indings, we should now

understand that support for public provisions signif‌icantly

depends on whether the broad public faces a redistributive

policy’s costs, or if a small wealthy segment does. Second,

the preferences between aff‌luent and less aff‌luent—and

political donor and non-donor—Democrats are larger than

previously estimated.

4

Partisanship is a powerful force in

politics, but economic interests within the Democratic

coalition have strong predictive power regarding prefer-

ences for redistribution that would require costs to be

absorbed by aff‌luent Democrats.

5

I conclude this paper by

discussing the implications of these f‌indings for research

on democratic representation by elected elites on these

issues.

What Structures Americans’

Redistribution Demands?

Political scientists have repeatedly shown that most voters

are “operationally liberal”(Ellis and Stimson, 2012;Free

and Hadley, 1967). In other words, they support increased

government spending in various policy areas (e.g.,

Ansolabehere, Rodden, and Snyder, 2006). Further, ma-

jorities also appear to support progressive taxation in

general (Ballard-Rosa, Martin, and Scheve, 2017) and

somewhat higher taxes on the wealthy, relative to the

status quo (Gilens, 2012;Stantcheva, 2021), but voters

would personally prefer to pay lower taxes, themselves,

independent from any other resulting policy changes

(Ballard-Rosa, Martin, and Scheve, 2017;Bartels, 2005).

6

What remains unclear is how American voters trade off

potential expansions of public benef‌its compared with

increased costs associated with new policies.

7

Scholars

have argued that Congress tends to make economic policy

that provides concentrated (i.e., direct) policy benef‌its

while spreading the costs in “diffuse”(i.e., felt less

Zacher 1147