How Main Street Sees Wall Street: Financial Regulation as a Second Dimension of Public Opinion on Economic Policy

Economic issues are often key drivers of policy preferences and voting behavior. Yet only select aspects of the economy are researched, such as general issue salience, retrospective evaluations, and redistributive policy preferences. Specifically, central though the financial industry is to most advanced industrial democracies, we know relatively little about what shapes citizens' preferences about banks and banking. Using original and representative survey data from six countries – Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States – we measure public opinion on a dozen economic policies. We find that policy preferences over financial regulation are distinct from those over economic redistribution. We further find that while a person's material circumstances are correlates of preferences over financial regulation, subjective assessments of economic status and well-being and core value predispositions are much stronger explanatory factors. Finally, we find that preferences over financial regulation have significant, if varying, implications for vote choice in the six countries under study.