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Published August 8, 2017 | Submitted
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Is there a Gender Gap in Fiscal Political Preferences?

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between attitudes on potential uses of the budget surplus and gender. Survey results show relatively weak support overall for using a projected surplus to reduce taxes, with respondents much likelier to prefer increased social spending on education or social security. There is a significant gender gap with men being far more likely than women to support tax cuts or paying down the national debt. Given a menu of particular types of tax cuts, women are marginally more likely to favor childcare relief or working poor tax credits whereas men are marginally more likely to favor capital gains reduction or tax rate cuts. When primed that the tax laws are biased against two-worker families, men significantly change their preferences, moving from support for general tax rate cuts to support for working poor tax relief, but not to child-care relief. One of the strongest results to emerge is that women are far more likely than men not to express an opinion or to confess ignorance about fiscal matters. Both genders increase their "no opinion" answer in the face of priming, but men more so than women. Further research will explore this no opinion/uncertainty aspect.

Additional Information

We thank the University of Southern California Center for Law, Communications, and Public Policy for a research grant that made our survey research possible. Alvarez thanks the IBM Corporation for supporting his research through the University Matching Grants Program. This paper was presented at the 2000 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association.

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Submitted - SSRN-id240502.pdf

Submitted - sswp1101.pdf

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August 19, 2023
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