Attachment to Government and Support for Government Debt.

In this paper, we seek to improve models of support for taxes, spending and borrowing beyond income, ideology and party identification. We discuss how trust in government and willingness to pay taxes have been measured in research around the globe. We present the notion of attachment as how citizens characterize the quality of their relationship to government. We test our measure of attachment, using well-understood analogies, with a sample of adult residents in the United States. The choice of analogy is a strong predictor of voter support for borrowing. These effects are separate from, and in addition to, commonly employed determinants (income, education, ideology, and party identification) and allow for stronger anti-government sentiments to be captured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]