Information, Equal Treatment, and Support for Regressive Taxation: Experimental Evidence from the United States

Regressive taxation plays an increasingly important role in financing public programs, but prior studies have not fully explored the conditions under which citizens would support such financing strategies. This paper fills this gap by focusing on the United States, where sales taxes account for nearly one-third of state government revenue, and sales tax ballot measures have received majority support. I conducted an online survey experiment to examine two potential sources of public support for a sales tax increase: equal treatment beliefs (i.e., that all taxpayers should pay the same rate) and a lack of public awareness of the distributive consequences of sales taxes. I find that exposure to information about sales taxes’ distributive consequences significantly reduced respondents’ support for a sales tax increase, but that equal treatment beliefs had no significant effect on such support. Additional analyses suggest that other-regarding motivations are a plausible mechanism underlying the effects of information provision. These findings shed light on how misperceptions of tax burdens shape support for regressive taxation and have broad implications for how fairness beliefs influence tax policy preferences.