Most Individuals Prefer to Compromise among Competing Normative Principles of Taxation

Abstract

We use a novel survey to gather direct and indirect evidence on how individuals reconcile their simultaneous support for opposing normative principles when forming their policy preferences. Our evidence suggests that, when choosing policy, a minority (approximately one-third) of individuals follow the recommendations of the principle they most strongly support, while the majority of individuals prefer, instead, to compromise. Those who compromise give multiple competing principles weights that roughly correspond to their relative levels of support for them.