Technocratic vs Partisan Framing in Regional Fiscal Politics: Experimental Evidence from Spain

How do citizens evaluate complex public policies when information is limited, and responsibility attribution is unclear? This paper examines the causal impact of source cues on attitudes toward subnational fiscal policies and the extent to which political alignment conditions citizens’ responses. Using an original survey of 1,501 adults in Galicia (Spain) we implement two randomized survey experiments that vary the attribution of identical policy statements across technocratic and partisan sources. The experiments cover two policy domains that differ in complexity and opinion crystallization: policy evaluation for improving public spending efficiency and a reform of the regional fiscal framework. Results show that source cues significantly shape opinion formation, primarily by reducing uncertainty and activating partisan reasoning. Their effects are modest when citizens hold well-defined prior preferences but become substantially stronger in complex and unfamiliar policy domains. Moreover, responses are systematically conditioned by political alignment: individuals are less supportive of proposals associated with opposing parties and more supportive when the same proposals are endorsed by their preferred party. These findings provide new evidence on the role of source cues as mechanisms of uncertainty reduction and preference formation in multilevel governance settings.