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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.

We examine the substantive meaning of public opinion on government spending using open-ended data from an original survey. Belying the conventional wisdom on this subject, we find that public opinion on government spending is not reducible to views on social welfare programs. While most people do have specific associations with spending, in the aggregate, public associations span a wide range of government functions. Balance does not necessarily mean harmony, however. We find strong evidence of what we callsubstantive divergencealong party lines in this area—when they think about spending, Republicans and Democrats envision different bundles of goods and services, on average. This is true even for opposing partisans with the same overall assessment of spending (e.g., those who say government spends too much). These findings bring fiscal conflict into sharper relief and also have broader implications for the conceptualization and measurement of differences across parties, as well as other political cleavages.

We show how symbolic politics condition public opinion on federal spending and how this helps to explain an important puzzle in contemporary American politics. Using multilevel regression and poststratification to estimate state-level opinion on federal spending, we show that, curiously, opposition to federal spending is higher in states receiving more federal money, per tax dollar paid. Belying the popular narrative surrounding so-called "red state socialism," we find that simple hypocrisy does not explain this paradox—individuals who are likely to benefit from spending tend to support it. But, income is a more powerful predictor of opinion on spending in "taker" states than "giver" states, heightening state-level opposition in the former. There is also more to the story than economic self-interest. Symbolic racism is four times more powerful than income in explaining opposition to spending, and there are more people with such attitudes in states receiving more federal money.

AbstractBy many measures, the public knows little about politics. But just how little people seem to know depends on the questions that are put to them. In particular, knowledge levels seem higher when people are asked closed- rather than open-ended questions. In turn, differences between estimated knowledge levels are sometimes attributed to fundamental differences between these types of questions. Building on this previous research, the present study uses a pre-registered experiment conducted with a representative national sample to shed new light on the relationship between question form and knowledge measurement. The authors find that inferences about political knowledge depend less on fundamental differences between open- and closed-ended questions than on two little-appreciated aspects of survey design: the number and difficulty of the response options that accompany closed-ended questions. These aspects of survey design have large effects. Scholars who use the same questions with different response options may reach substantively different conclusions about the public's levels of knowledge.

An influential paper by Caughey and Sekhon (2011a) suggests that the outcomes of very close US House elections in the postwar era may not be as-if random, thus calling into question this application of regression discontinuity for causal inference. We show that while incumbent party candidates are more likely to win close House elections, those who win are no different on observable characteristics from those who lose. Further, all differences in observable characteristics between barely winning Democrats and barely winning Republicans vanish conditional on which party is the incumbent. Any source of a special incumbent party advantage in close elections must be due to variables that cannot be observed. This finding supports the conclusion of Eggers et al. (2015) that Caughey and Sekhon's discovery of lopsided wins by incumbents in close races is a mere statistical fluke.

The founding debate of judicial politics is Supreme Court decision making driven by law or politics? remains at center stage. One influential line of attack involves the identification of jurisprudential regimes, stable patterns of case decisions based on the influence of case factors. The key test is whether the regime changes after a major precedent-setting decision, that is, whether the case factors are subsequently treated differently by the Supreme Court justices themselves so that they vote as though constrained by precedent. We analyze whether binding jurisprudential regime change actually exists. The standard test assumes votes are independent observations, even though they are clustered by case and by term. We argue that a (nonparametric) 'randomization test' is more appropriate. We find little evidence that precedents affect voting. Adapted from the source document.