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

今天美国公共政策的特点是间接治理-通过税收减免或贷款担保等机制而不是直接支付，向个人和其他实体提供福利。 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，学者们还没有阐明和严格测试替代理论帐户，以解释为什么公民对这些计划的看法不同。 为什么交付机制会塑造公民对政府项目的看法？ 该项目调查了公众对间接项目的明显偏见，明确关注公民对通过税法提供的福利的看法。 它阐述了一系列基于框架效应的假设，并通过一系列调查实验来测试这些假设，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。 首先，它从事并有助于政治学的几个相关和新兴领域，从美国政治经济学到公共舆论和政策分析。 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遗漏变量偏差的陷阱。 第三，该项目的创新之处在于，它采用这种方法来严格测试有关公众对公共政策的看法差异的论点。第四，几项早期试点研究的结果证明了该项目的可行性，该项目还在学术界以外产生了广泛的影响。 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。 该项目的研究结果将使政策进程的学者和实践者都感兴趣。 一些记者、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，表明它有可能有助于公众理解政策设计的影响。 最后，鉴于当前修改国家税法的政治势头，通过税收支出实施政策已成为有关税收改革辩论的一个突出因素。 了解塑造公民对间接政府计划的看法的力量将对潜在税收改革的政治可行性和影响提供重要的启示。

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.