The literature on attitudes toward government budgets has been dominated by two distinct approaches, jointly studying both sides of the ledger (holistic approaches) and studying attitudes over spending and revenue separately (singular approaches). Despite both approaches being widely adopted, scholars have given limited attention to testing empirically how methodological differences in the approaches may affect measures of fiscal attitudes and the inferences we draw from those measures. In this paper, we ask, “Do the different approaches to studying the budget alter mass attitudes toward spending and taxes, and if so, how?” Using data from an Amazon MTurk survey experiment, we find that spending choices differ significantly (attitude instability) across the two approaches. On the revenue side, our results show that choices over taxation tend to remain consistent and stable, regardless of whether the choices include only taxes or the combination of taxes and spending.

中文翻译：

---

评估财政态度的稳定性：来自调查实验的证据

关于政府预算态度的文献主要由两种不同的方法主导，即共同研究分类账的两面（整体方法）和分别研究对支出和收入的态度（单一方法）。尽管这两种方法都被广泛采用，但学者们对实证检验方法中的方法差异如何影响财政态度的衡量以及我们从这些衡量中得出的推论给予了有限的关注。在本文中，我们问道：“研究预算的不同方法是否改变了大众对支出和税收的态度，如果是，如何改变？” 使用来自 Amazon MTurk 调查实验的数据，我们发现两种方法的支出选择存在显着差异（态度不稳定）。在收入方面，