Social Context and Revenue Measures

在这个项目中，新的计算方法被应用于3000多个地方税收措施的文本，这些措施在不同的地方或多或少受到选民公投的影响。这些数据被用来研究税收政策特征如何调节多样性对选民支付公共支出意愿的已知影响。研究结果将对可持续收入来源产生新的见解。这对于使美国社会能够应对未来的财政挑战至关重要，因此对于美国社会的健康、繁荣和福利以及国家安全也至关重要。该项目涉及自1986年以来向当地选民提出的税收措施的汇编和数字化。然后应用监督和无监督机器学习技术对这些措施进行分类，并识别文本的特征，这些特征调解了观察到的多样性与报告的选举结果之间的关联。该项目的最一般目标是确定缓和社会背景和公共支出之间联系的体制机制。一个更具体的目标是确定多样性与卫生、福利和其他社会转移和服务方面的公共支出之间众所周知的负相关关系的原因。因此，该项目促进了对影响投票行为的政策维度的理论理解。它还分析了产生财政社会学中最重要的观察模式之一的制度机制。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

In this project, new computational methods are applied to the texts of more than 3,000 local revenue measures that were subject to voter referendums in more and less diverse places. These data are used to investigate how tax policy characteristics may moderate the known effects of diversity on voters' willingness to pay for public spending. The results will yield new insights into what makes for a sustainable revenue source. This is crucial for enabling American society to meet the fiscal challenges of the future, and thus for the health, prosperity and welfare of American society as well as for national security. The project involves the assembly and digitization of revenue measures presented to local voters since 1986. Supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques then are applied to classify these measures and to identify features of the text that mediate the observed associations between diversity and reported election outcomes. The most general goal of the project is to identify institutional mechanisms that moderate associations between social context and public spending. A more specific goal is to identify the causes of the well-known negative association between diversity and public spending on health, welfare, and other social transfers and services. The project thereby advances theoretical understanding of the dimensions of policy that affect voting behavior. It also analyzes institutional mechanisms that yield one of the most important observed patterns in fiscal sociology.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.