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Are Policy Analogies Persuasive? The Household Budget Analogy and Public Support for Austerity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2021

Lucy Barnes Open the ORCID record for Lucy Barnes [Opens in a new window]  and
Timothy Hicks Open the ORCID record for Timothy Hicks [Opens in a new window]
Lucy Barnes
Affiliation:
School of Public Policy, University College London, London, UK
Timothy Hicks*
Affiliation:
School of Public Policy, University College London, London, UK
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: t.hicks@ucl.ac.uk
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Abstract

Public opinion on complex policy questions is shaped by the ways in which elites simplify the issues. Given the prevalence of metaphor and analogy as tools for cognitive problem solving, the deployment of analogies is often proposed as a tool for this kind of influence. For instance, a prominent explanation for the acceptance of austerity is that voters understand government deficits through an analogy to household borrowing. Indeed, there are theoretical reasons to think the household finance analogy represents a most likely case for the causal influence of analogical reasoning on policy preferences. This article examines this best-case scenario using original survey data from the United Kingdom. It reports observational and experimental analyses that find no evidence of causation running from the household analogy to preferences over the government budget. Rather, endorsement of the analogy is invoked ex post to justify support for fiscal consolidation.

Keywords

political economyausteritygovernment debtpolitical attitudes
Type
Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , July 2022 , pp. 1296 - 1314
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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