Policy Attitudes in Institutional Context: Rules, Uncertainty, and the Mass Politics of Public Investment

Abstract

This article examines the link between citizens’ policy attitudes and the institutional context in which policies are carried out. The article develops a theory of opinion formation toward policies that impose costs on citizens in order to invest in broadly valued social goods. In this framework, problems of agency loss and time inconsistency leave citizens uncertain about whether promised policy benefits will be delivered. Citizen support for public investments thus depends on whether the institutional context makes elites’ policy promises credible. We consider hypotheses about how the institutional allocation of authority and the institutional rules governing implementation affect citizen support for public investment, and we find broad support for the framework in three survey experiments administered to representative samples of U.S. citizens. The results shed light on the link between political institutions and citizens’ attitudes, the capacities of voters for substantive political reasoning, and the political prospects for public investment.

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