Debt beliefs and public support for restrictive fiscal rules

• Lay persons often underestimate public debt levels • Adapting beliefs about debt levels can affect public support for fiscal policies • Experiment shows that mere debt info does not raise support for strict fiscal rules • Information about debt levels abroad influence support for strict fiscal rules The public tends to underestimate the level of public debt. Can information about the actual level of indebtedness in one's own country, or elsewhere, make people more supportive of restrictive fiscal policies such as stringent fiscal rules? To answer this question, we run a set of well-powered survey experiments on quota-representative samples of respondents in Germany and Poland. We show that the mere information about the actual level of public debt in one's own country does not increase people's support for stringent fiscal rules. However, informing people about the levels of public debt abroad does have an effect. On average, people are more (less) supportive of strict fiscal rules when they are provided with the information about the low (high) level of public debt abroad.