28
indeed, to account for most of the net support for the tax cut in the NES sample.
36
The Impact of Political Information
So far, I have argued that public support for the Bush tax cuts derives in considerable part
from unenlightened considerations of self-interest on the part of people who do not recognize the
implications of Bush’s policies for their own economic well-being or their broader political
values. Millions of citizens say that the federal government should spend more on a wide variety
of programs, that the rich are asked to pay too little in taxes, and that growing economic
inequality is a bad thing—but simultaneously support policies whose main effects will be to
reduce the tax burden of the rich, constrain funding for government programs, and exacerbate
growing economic inequality. One is left to wonder how these people would resolve the
contradictions implied by their simultaneous antipathies toward inequality and taxation—if they
recognized those contradictions.
Elsewhere, I have proposed a way to explore admittedly hypothetical questions of this sort
by observing how the political preferences of well-informed citizens differ from those of less-
informed citizens who are similar in politically relevant ways (Bartels 1990; along related lines
see Bartels 1996; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Fishkin 1997; Gilens 2001). If well-informed
citizens have systematically different perceptions and preferences, the logic goes, might not
additional information move less-informed citizens in the same directions? In the present
context, if well-informed citizens seem to reason differently, draw on different premises, and
36
The sample mean value for the (
−
1 to +1) tax cut variable (excluding respondents who said they
“haven’t thought about” whether they favored or opposed it) is .352. Multiplying the sample mean value
for Own Tax Burden among these same respondents, .482, by the corresponding parameter estimate in the
fourth column of Table 4, .426, accounts for 58% of this net support for repealing the inheritance tax.
Convention