In two previous posts I blogged about support for US farm subsidies.  This is part of a research agenda that I’ve largely struggled to publish outside of one article.  But I’m still pushing ahead on this.

In one post I examined how the inclusion of food stamps into the US farm bill affected public support for agriculture subsidies.  While Ferejohn argues that this was essential to the farm bill logroll, I find find little public opinion effect.

What I do find is that individuals in the US are very sensitive to “global frames”.  You can read my post about the results, but if you frame the US as high relative to other countries in terms of farm subsidies, support drops.  If you frame it as low relative to other countries, support increases.

We just ran a series of survey experiments in the YouGovUK.  Lots of results on policy diffusion, globalizaiton and accountability, and globalization preferences coming soon.

But I added one question on farm subsidies in the UK.  One half of our 1,500 respondents received Prime A and one half Prime B.

Prime A: Countries around the world provide different types of support for farmers, including financial payments to farmers.  European farm payments are generally more generous than those of foreign countries, such as Australia and Canada.

Prime B: Countries around the world provide different types of support for farmers, including financial payments to farmers.  European farm payments are generally less generous than those of foreign countries, such as Japan and South Korea.

Then the respondents were asked the following question:

Which of the following statements best describes your opinion?

1. Britain should increase farm payments
2. Britain should decrease farm payments
3. Don’t know

What do the results look like?

In aggregate almost 40% supported increases, 26% decreases and 34% indicated don’t know.

Individuals identifying as Labour and Conservative supporters had similar numbers indicating Britain should increase farm payments (around 40%).  Labour had more Don’t Know answers than Conservatives (35% to 26%) and Conservatives were more likely to indicate prefering a decrease in farm payments (33% to 24%).

What were the results of the experiment?  Really no aggregate impact.  I just started looking at this data on Monday, but there doesn’t seem to be nearly as much movement as in the US data.   There is essentially zero impact across all categories.

Why is this the case?

1.  One concern I had in the set-up of this survey is how the European Common Agriculture Policy affects policy preferences.  The UK really doesn’t have unilateral control over their agriculture policy.  Also, framing EU subsidies relative to the rest of the world is a real difference from the US.

2.  It is possible that since the CAP has been debated extensively, Brits know a lot more about agriculture policy and have fixed preferences on the issues.  But this YouGov survey suggests very low level of knowledge by people in the UK on farming and farm policy.

I put this farming question on the UK survey as a quick pilot for future work.  I have to think harder about this and I have a bunch of co-variates in the data on who the respondents blame or assign credit to for economic outcomes, some good knowledge questions, etc

But the fact that the US results came out so clean and the magnitude was so large makes me think there is a real systematic difference.  But why?