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Carving Out: Isolating the True Effect of Self-Interest on Policy Attitudes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2020

JAKE HASELSWERDT Open the ORCID record for JAKE HASELSWERDT [Opens in a new window]
JAKE HASELSWERDT*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri
*
Jake Haselswerdt, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and Truman School of Public Affairs, University of Missouri, haselswerdtj@missouri.edu.
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Abstract

How important is self-interest in people’s opinions about public policy? If a policy proposal exempts a subset of the target group from costs that others will have to pay, or denies them benefits that others will enjoy, do they respond according to self-interest? This experimental study distinguishes between true self-interest and affinity for one’s in-group by exploiting a common feature of policy proposals: age-based “carve-outs” that prevent otherwise similar subgroups of a population from being affected by the benefits or burdens of a new policy (e.g., cuts to an old-age program that exempt people above a certain age). I find self-interest effects for older Americans exempt from cuts to Medicare and younger people too old to benefit from a hypothetical student debt relief program. These effects vary in ways that are consistent with extant theory.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 1103 - 1116
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank Andrea L. Campbell, Lael Keiser, Jonathan Krieckhaus, Lisel Hintz, Adam Seth Levine, Alyx Mark, Suzanne Mettler, Joshua Meyer-Gutbrod, Jamila Michener, Shyamala Nagaraj, Edward C. Norton, Brendan Nyhan, Thomas R. Oliver, John Sides, Ugo Troiano, Christopher Robert Way, and Laron Williams for guidance and feedback on this project. The author also thanks Jordan Butcher and Cody Drolc for research assistance and acknowledges funding support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program at the University of Michigan and the Department of Political Science and Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RSSRRV.

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