Public Attitudes toward the Policy Responsibilities of the National and State Governments: Evidence from South Carolina

Abstract

How do Americans feel about the respective policy responsibilities of the national and state governments? This article addresses this question using data from a public opinion survey in South Carolina. The study has three major findings. First, people do seem to have meaningful opinions about national versus state government responsibilities, regardless of whether the issue is presented in policy-specific or general terms. Second, framing effects do not exist for these attitudes because the aggregate distributions of opinion do not change across the two presentations. Third, citizens' beliefs about specific programmatic activities appear to be derived largely from their more general comparative evaluations of the national and state governments. These findings have important implications for both scholarly theories of and practical political concerns about federalism in the United States.