Understanding Public Support for Budget Cuts and Tax Increases
In her dissertation, political scientist Alessia Aspide explores how public attitudes toward fiscal policy are formed. Her key finding: fiscal preferences are not shaped in a vacuum, but are deeply embedded in institutional, political, and societal contexts.
Public support for budget cuts and tax increases remains a contentious issue in European politics. In her dissertation Fiscal Preferences in Context: Fiscal rules, political agendas, and the mass politics of public debt, which Aspide will defend on the 15th of May, she examines how citizens form opinions about such often unpopular policies. ‘Fiscal attitudes don’t arise in isolation,’ she explains. ‘They are shaped by institutional rules, political agendas, and policy trade-offs.’
The dissertation consists of three experimental studies investigating how context influences attitudes toward fiscal policy, particularly austerity measures. The first study investigates whether European fiscal rules influence public support for austerity, taking into account that fiscal policymaking in the EU is shaped not only by national considerations but also by supranational constraints. Contrary to findings in other policy domains—such as environmental regulation or human rights—where international commitments can bolster public backing, her results show that EU fiscal rules have little to no effect on public attitudes toward austerity. ‘Therefore, European-level commitments cannot be used as a political tool to legitimize unpopular budget cuts,’ Aspide concludes.
The second and third studies shift the focus from institutional constraints to the role of political agendas and policy trade-offs in shaping fiscal attitudes. The second study considers how the growing prominence of sociocultural issues —such as immigration civil rights, and national identity—reshapes electoral decision-making. It examines the weight citizens attach to fiscal policy in electoral decision-making and its interaction with sociocultural concerns. The findings indicate that while fiscal policies influence voter preferences when evaluated in isolation, their effect significantly diminishes when sociocultural issues are introduced into the agenda: ‘Voters don’t assess fiscal issues in a vacuum—they weigh them against other pressing political topics,’ Aspide says.
'When participants are informed about the positive fiscal contributions of immigrants, support for migration increases, and backing for austerity decreases.'
The third study further explores fiscal and sociocultural policies, focusing on immigration as a potential path to debt reduction alternative to austerity. While immigration is often framed in public discourse as a sociocultural issue, with portrayals of immigrants as economic burdens, it also carries significant fiscal implications. This study shows that when participants are informed about the positive fiscal contributions of immigrants, support for migration increases, and backing for austerity decreases. ‘When fiscal and immigration policies are framed as interconnected,’ she notes, ‘the economic benefits of immigration can outweigh cultural concerns.’
A Personal Drive Behind the Research
Aspide’s interest in the topic is not merely academic. ‘I grew up in Italy during a time of austerity and saw first-hand how anti-austerity sentiment shaped wider social dynamics,’ she says. This personal experience led her to question the simplistic explanations often found in the media. Stereotypes, assumptions about cultural traits regularly were used as ‘explanations’ for public debt problems. Today, with growing public debt and competing demands for public investment, understanding how people think about fiscal trade-offs is more relevant than ever. ‘It helps us identify which policies are viable—and at what political cost.’
Developing as a Researcher and a Teacher
Beyond academic insights, the PhD journey brought personal and professional growth. ‘I had to learn how to deal with impostor syndrome,’ Aspide shares. ‘I was lucky to have my supervisor Matthew DiGiuseppe guide me step by step, and colleagues who made me feel I belong in the field.’ She also deepened her methodological skills through summer schools in quantitative methods, and broadened her policy perspective via the Europaeum Scholars Programme. Teaching, too, became a key part of her experience: ‘Engaging with students and their enthusiasm was energizing.’
Looking Ahead
Since October 2024, Aspide has been a postdoctoral researcher in political economy at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, where she studies how different regional growth models shape public reactions to austerity. She also teaches a course on the political economy of the Eurozone at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. She hopes to continue her career in academia. ‘I truly enjoy both research and teaching,’ she says, ‘but it’s a difficult time for early-career researchers, with growing precarity and shrinking academic opportunities. Time will tell where this path leads.’