Since Converse (1964) first proposed his “nonattitudes hypothesis,” numerous studies have confirmed that the public at large lacks ideologically consistent political attitudes. I put forth an event-based theory of attitude crystallization that explains how elections can strengthen attitude consistency and apply it to an issue domain integral to the left-right (liberal-conservative) cleavage: welfare politics. Specifically, I theorize that elections that give ideological opponents a majority will mobilize ideological predispositions, leading to more coherent welfare attitudes. I test the argument by relying on 11 Danish surveys linked to official records on local elections over four decades and using a regression discontinuity design. Evidence strongly supports the notion that elections increase attitude consistency if the majority produced goes against the individual’s ideological preferences. The findings stress the dynamic nature of attitude structure and the important role regular political events play in that regard.
The relative importance of ideological orientations and material self-interest as determinants of political attitudes is still discussed. Using a novel list experiment on opposition to progressive taxation embedded in a large representative Danish online survey (N = 2,010), I study how social desirability concerns bias the conclusions survey researchers draw regarding the influence of self-interest (gauged by income) and ideology (measured by left-right self-identifications) on public opinion. I find that right-wingers are much less opposed to progressive taxation when attitudes are measured indirectly and unobtrusively by means of the list experiment relative to asking directly about their opinions. In fact, rightists are no more against progressive taxation than leftists and centrists. Furthermore, opposition to tax progressivity is considerably lower among low-income individuals when social desirability bias is addressed, thereby increasing the attitudinal gap between low- and high-income individuals. The implications of the findings are that survey research risks exaggerating the importance of ideological orientations and underestimating how much political views reflect material self-interest.
If citizens pay insufficient attention to tax policies or cannot figure out how they are taxed, politicians may raise taxes more than is desired by the public, with few electoral repercussions. This scenario is central to the notion of “fiscal illusion” and is potentially problematic from a democratic point of view. In this article, I argue that payday is an opportunity for citizens to update their tax preferences. When people are paid and taxed, they are likely to think more about personal consumption relative to public consumption and be more aware of how the current tax system affects their personal finances, leading to increased tax skepticism. Studying this in Denmark, where payday falls on the same day for most people, and using a temporal regression discontinuity design, I find that support for tax cuts goes up by approximately 10 percentage points at payday. Further analyses suggest that this result is not driven by narrow economic self-interest, because the effect does not systematically vary across income groups. Rather, payday seems to mobilize ideological predispositions, as the effect is largest among rightists, for whom taxes are an especially strong political symbol. The implications for opinion formation and democratic accountability are discussed.
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