Dartmouth Events

Livestream: https://dartgo.org/deficits

Rocky Talk Live

Do Voters Actually Care About Federal Budget Deficits? How Partisan Bias Shapes the Importance of Issues

Speaker: John V. Kane
Assistant Professor
New York University

Host: Jason Barabas ’93
Director, Rockefeller Center
Professor, Department of Government
Dartmouth College

Lecture Info:
We hear a lot of talk about budget deficits, but do voters really care about government spending as much as they say? Like many other kinds of political attitudes, concern about government deficits and debt may be, in part, a result of systematic partisan bias. Drawing upon his recently published article, “Deficit Attention Disorder” (co-authored with Ian G. Anson), Kane shows how both partisans and partisan media shift their concern about deficits in response to changes in party control of the presidency. These results corroborate Kane and Anson’s theory of “partisan-motivated issue attention” (PMIA), in which partisans can satisfy partisan instincts by caring more, or less, about particular issues when it benefits their preferred party. 

Speaker Bio:

John V. Kane, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. His primary research interests include political psychology, political attitudes, and experimental research methodology. His research has been published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Experimental Political Science, Political Behavior, and Public Opinion Quarterly. He teaches graduate courses on research methods, statistics and data analysis, and political psychology, and has also received teaching excellence awards from both Stony Brook University and New York University.

Moderator Bio:

Jason Barabas ’93 is the Director of the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences at Dartmouth College as well as a Professor in the Department of Government. Professor Barabas earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Northwestern University and his undergraduate degree in Government from Dartmouth. In the years since, he has held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Princeton as well as academic faculty positions in New York, Florida, and Illinois. Currently, Professor Barabas teaches and conducts research on public policy and opinion preferences with an emphasis on research design. Jason Barabas is a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, and he has received professional awards from the American Political Science Association and the International Society for Political Psychology.