Christopher Faricy
Assistant Professor, Political Science
Degree
Ph.D., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2010
Specialties
American politics, social policy, political economy, income inequality, public opinion
Personal Website
http://faricy.wordpress.com/
Courses
Introduction
to American Politics, The Politics of Income Inequality, Introduction to
Political Analysis, Social Welfare Seminar, Political Parties and Elections
Seminar
Publications
Christopher
Faricy. 2016. “The Distributive Politics of Tax Expenditures: How Parties Use Policy
Tools to Distribute Federal Money to the Rich and the Poor." Politics, Groups, and Identities 4(1):
110-125.
Christopher
Faricy. 2015. Welfare for the Wealthy:
Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
with
Christopher Ellis. 2014. “Public Attitudes Toward Direct Social Spending in the
United States: The Differences Between Direct Spending and Tax
Expenditures." Political Behavior
36(1): 53-76.
with Christopher Ellis. 2011. “Social Policy and Public Opinion: How the
Ideological Direction of Spending Influences Public Mood.” The Journal of
Politics (73):1095-1110)
Christopher Faricy. 2011. “The Politics of Social Policy in America: The Causes
and Effects of Indirect versus Direct Social Spending.” The Journal of
Politics (73):74-83
Michele Hoyman & Christopher Faricy. 2009. “It Takes a Village: A Test of
the Creative Class, Social Capital and Human Capital Theories.” Urban
Affairs Review (44): 311-333
Research Projects
Welfare
for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States
(Cambridge University Press 2015).
How
does political party control of the federal government determine changes to
social policy and by extension influence inequality in America? Conventional
theories show that the Democratic Party when in power produces more social
expenditures and consequently less inequality. Welfare for the Wealthy
reexamines the relationship between parties and social policy by recognizing
the social system as divided and government spending as a choice between public
spending and private subsidies. Christopher Faricy argues that both Democrats and
Republicans have electoral and policy incentives to increase social spending
just delivered through different policy mechanisms and targeted towards
divergent socioeconomic classes. Faricy using a unique data set of federal tax
expenditures shows that Republicans increase social spending through the tax
code, which benefits businesses and wealthier workers. In particular, he
demonstrates that increases in the level of social tax expenditures are paid
for with cuts to discretionary public social spending, which taken together
contribute to higher levels of inequality. This analysis has implications for
who provides social services, who receives government assistance for social
benefits, and income inequality in the United States.
Public Opinion, Race, and Social Spending in America (Forthcoming)
This is a working book manuscript
coauthored with Christopher Ellis and funded by the Russell Sage Foundation. We
are interested in how citizens form opinions toward social spending issues, and
how policymakers respond to such opinions when crafting policy. We examine the
relationship between public opinion and government spending through
illustrating how the predictors of support for specific social tax expenditures
differs from the predictors of support for both traditional social spending and
tax policy more generally. Next, we analyze the role that tax expenditures play
in conditioning how citizens view recipients of government aid. We use survey
experiments to find that, all else equal, citizens view recipients of social
tax expenditures both more positively and more deserving of the aid than
benefits received through public programs. These attributes are, in part, a
function of tax expenditure recipients being viewed as mainly white and
middle-class. Republican voters are particularly likely to hold these
perceptions of tax expenditure recipients, even for programs with low-income
and racially diverse clientele such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).
We are currently exploring the role that racism and
other forms of prejudice play in conditioning support for social spending. Our
results suggest that attitudes toward tax expenditures (unlike attitudes toward
downward-redistributing direct spending) do not prime racially-charged
considerations in the minds of citizens. Finally, we study how voters form
attitudes towards upwardly distributing social tax expenditures like the home
mortgage interest deduction. The initially results suggest that citizens view
the average recipient of these programs as being a white middle-class household
and therefore deserving of government assistance. We hope that our study will
also have implications for understanding how tax expenditures are used to
either exacerbate or ameliorate income inequality in the United States.