Survey Items Used in the Experiments

The questions compared in the experiments are known as the spending priority items. They were the first items on both the 2002 GSS and KNS (thereby controlling for context). The 2002 GSS, like the 2000 GSS, asked the eleven standard wordings and eleven variant wordings on random subsamples. These were then each followed by the six spending items without variant wordings. This same between-subjects design was used on the 2000 KNS, but the 2002 KNS used a within-subjects design in which the eleven standard items were asked first, followed by the other six standard items and then the eleven variant items.