Measuring public preferences for government spending under constraints: a conjoint-analytic approach

ABSTRACT

Governmental budgets and the priorities they reflect are the subjects of recurring political debate. Research on political representation commonly focuses on relative spending preferences, mostly in isolated domains that are unconstrained, and so provides only limited information about people’s preferences. Recent survey work considers the effects of asking about absolute spending levels in different substantive areas and in the face of revenue constraints. No studies do all three, though two studies get close and provide more fine-grained measures of preferences for spending change. We follow their lead but in a more general way, offering budget profiles that include increases as well as decreases in spending levels, embedded in a conjoint experiment in Sweden. Our results reveal that people appear to hold preferences on specific magnitudes of spending change, budgetary constraints matter, and the effects of increases and decreases in spending are not symmetrical. Although the implied preferences for spending are similar in direction to expressed relative preferences that are unconstrained, the levels of support across domains are different. The findings have implications for assessments of opinion representation, as inferences about the responsiveness of policy to preferences – and the congruence between them – differ depending on measurement of the latter.

Acknowledgements

Previous versions of this article were presented at the 2016 EPOP conference in Canterbury and the 3rd Barcelona-Gothenburg-Bergen Workshop on Experimental Political Science in 2017. We would like to thank the participants as well as the reviewers and editor of JEPOP for their very valuable comments, which improved the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Appendix 3 for more information on the considerations relating to the spending levels used in the profiles.

2 For more information on the pre-test results and the survey design, see Appendix 3. Including a status quo might produce a status-quo bias, potentially making our approach a (more) relative one as well, but with specific amounts. While we cannot test this given our research design, it implies that our analysis might provide conservative estimates of the effects of the conjoint approach.

3 Only the effect of including 55 billion SEK for defence is (just) statistically significant (p < .05).

4 See question 2a-d in Appendix 2, which also includes a 5-point response scale where the mid-point reflects the status quo. While this design may induce some bias due to priming, we find little evidence of such effects – see Appendix 3, Tables A1 and A2.

5 Approximately 60% of the profiles include the status quo for at least one domain.

6 See Appendix 5 for an example. Appendix 4 shows that the results remain substantively the same when net support is calculated using the distribution only from the first choice task.

7 Recall that these differences are not a methodological artifact, i.e., they cannot be explained by the greater balance implicit in the conjoint approach.

8 Some issues (healthcare) seem less sensitive in their direction and magnitude to changes in the question format than others. It might indicate that respondents have a “relative preference importance” (Hausermann, Kurer, and Traber 2019, 1067) for healthcare spending.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Forskningsrådet om Hälsa, Arbetsliv och Välfärd [grant number 2013-2692].