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Abstract

Ever since the Great Recession, the issue of public debt has become more salient and politicized. Existing research claims that citizens are fiscally conservative and oppose debt. However, we do not know whether and how much citizens care about government debt, given that reducing it, often under the guise of austerity, involves substantial spending and tax trade-offs. We account for these budgetary trade-offs by using a split-sample and conjoint survey experiment in four European countries. The results show that fiscal consolidation is not a priority for citizens. When forced to choose, support for lower debt at the cost of lower spending or higher taxes is smaller than in an unconstrained setting. Revenue-based consolidations are especially unpopular, but expenditure-based consolidations are also contested. Moreover, the public has clear fiscal policy priorities: People do not favor lower debt and taxes, but they support more progressive taxes to pay for higher government spending.