Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Policy Tools and Public Opinion

今天的美国公共政策的特点是间接治理--通过减税或贷款担保等机制向个人和其他实体提供利益，而不是直接支付。现有的学者认为，公民对间接福利计划的反应和评估与传统的直接支出计划不同，即使它们可能产生相同的好处。尽管如此，学者们还没有阐明并严格测试其他理论解释，以解释为什么公民对这些项目的看法不同。为什么这种交付机制会影响公民对政府项目的看法？这个项目调查了公众对间接计划的明显偏见，明确关注公民对税法带来的好处的看法。它阐述了一系列基于框架效应的假设，并通过一组调查实验对它们进行了检验，这些实验操纵了所描述的公共政策的交付方法和其他方面。该项目在几个方面符合NSF的智力价值标准。首先，它参与并贡献了几个相关的和新兴的政治学领域，从美国政治经济学到公众舆论和政策分析。其次，该项目在方法上是严格的，因为它使用了实验设计来做出可靠的因果推断，避免了困扰观察性研究设计的省略变量偏差的陷阱。第三，该项目的创新之处在于，它采用了这种方法来严格测试有关公众对公共政策认知差异的论点。第四，早前几项先导研究的结果证明了该项目的可行性。该项目还具有重大的更广泛的影响，超出了学术界。公民对政府政策的理解和反应是任何现代民主的核心，但令人惊讶的是，我们对这些过程是如何运作的知之甚少。这一项目的结果将引起政策过程中的学者和实践者的兴趣。几名记者、政策实践者和政治学学科以外的其他人已经对这项研究的初步结果表示了兴趣，这表明它有可能有助于公众理解政策设计的影响。最后，考虑到当前修改国家税法的政治势头，通过税收支出传递政策已成为有关税收改革的辩论的一个突出因素。了解影响公民对间接政府项目看法的力量，将有助于了解潜在税收改革的政治可行性和影响。

American public policy today is characterized by indirect governance -- the delivery of benefits to individuals and other entities through mechanisms such as tax breaks or loan guarantees rather than direct payments. Existing scholarship argues that citizens react to and evaluate indirect benefit programs differently than they do traditional direct spending programs, even though they may produce identical benefits. Still, scholars have yet to articulate and rigorously test alternative theoretical accounts to explain why citizens perceive these programs differently. Why would the mechanism of delivery shape citizen perceptions of government programs? This project investigates the apparent public bias in favor of indirect programs, with an explicit focus on citizens' perception of benefits delivered through the tax code. It elaborates a series of hypotheses based on framing effects, and tests them through a set of survey experiments that manipulate the delivery method and other aspects of described public policies.The project meets NSF's intellectual merit criterion in several ways. First, it engages and contributes to several relevant and emerging areas of political science, ranging from American political economy to public opinion and policy analysis. Second, the project is methodologically rigorous in that it uses an experimental design to make reliable causal inferences, avoiding the pitfalls of omitted variable bias that plague observational research designs. Third, the project is innovative in the way that it employs this approach to rigorously test arguments about variation in public perceptions of public policies. Fourth, the results of several earlier pilot studies demonstrate the feasibility of the project.The project also has significant broader impact beyond academia. Citizens' understanding of and reactions to government policies are central to any modern democracy, but we know surprisingly little about exactly how these processes work. The findings of this project will be of interest to both scholars of and practitioners in the policy process. Already, several journalists, policy practitioners and others outside of the discipline of political science have expressed interest in the preliminary findings of this study, indicating its potential to contribute to public understanding of the implications of policy design. Finally, given the current political momentum to revise the nation's tax code, the delivery of policy through tax expenditures has become a salient element of debates about tax reform. Understanding the forces that shape citizen views about indirect government programs will shed important light on the political feasibility and impact of potential tax reforms.