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Rising inequality and public support for redistribution
Abstract
Seminal models in political economy imply that rising economic inequality should lead to growing public demand for redistribution. Yet, existing empirical evidence on this link is both limited and inconclusive – and scholars regularly doubt it exists at all. In this research note, we turn to data from the International Social Survey Programme's (ISSP) Social Inequality surveys, now spanning the period from 1987 to 2019, to reassess the effect of rising inequality on support for redistribution. Covering a longer time series than previous studies, we obtain robust evidence that when income inequality rises in a country, public support for income redistribution tends to go up. Examining the reaction across income groups to adjudicate between different models of how rising inequality matters in a second step, we find that rising inequality increases support for redistribution within all income groups, with a marginally stronger effect among the well‐off. Our results imply that insufficient policy responses to rising inequality may be less about absent demand and more about a failure to turn demand into policy, and that scholars should devote more attention to the latter.
... To examine the association between income inequality and support for redistribution, scholarship relies either on cross-sectional or aggregate-level longitudinal data (e.g., Dallinger, 2010;Dion and Birchfield, 2010;Finseraas, 2009;Jaeger, 2013;Kenworthy and Pontusson, 2005;Lübker, 2007) or tests expectations using non-random samples or samples from economically developed countries (e.g., Breznau and Hommerich, 2019;Hillen and Steiner, 2024;Schmidt-Catran, 2016) with comparatively low levels of income inequality (Theyson and Heller, 2015). Yet, static survey data makes it more difficult to validate whether a relationship is spurious or note and survey data considered in aggregated form are exposed to the risk of committing an ecological fallacy (Fairbrother, 2014). ...
... Instead, the results are in line with comparative studies that provide evidence of a longitudinal effect of income inequality on public demand for redistribution (e.g., Andersen et al., 2021;Hillen and Steiner, 2024;Jaeger, 2013;Schmidt-Catran, 2016). A longitudinal effect-net of countries' levels of economic prosperity and controlling for compositional effects at the individual level-is more robust evidence to ensure this relationship is not spurious. ...
... Delving into the implications of these results, further studies should go beyond the first proposition of the RMR model (i.e., that public demand for redistribution should increase as inequality rises) in order to assess the extent to which demand for redistribution is in fact being expressed in votes (proposition 2) and supplied by incumbent parties that implement redistributive policies (proposition 3). Differently put, in contexts where increases in income inequality do seem to translate into higher demand for redistributive policies, researchers should start focusing less on the demand and more on the supply side of redistribution; that is, the extent to which public demands are in fact being translated into public policy (see Hillen and Steiner, 2024). Following propositions 2 and 3 from the RMR model, the often-puzzling absence of redistributive policies may be more about political parties and elites being reluctant to implement them than about people not reacting and demanding more redistribution. ...
Although extensive research indicates that economic inequality drives public demand for redistribution, longitudinal evidence of this association in unequal contexts remains scarce. Using pooled cross-sections of surveys from over 140,000 individuals consistently observed between 2008 and 2019, this study tests the inequality-redistribution nexus in Latin America. I examine both the general association between inequality and public demand for redistribution as well as the conditional effect of individual-level income. Main results suggest that public preferences over redistribution systematically react to rising inequality. Findings further indicate that this effect is consistent across income groups. In line with a growing body of work, public demand for state-led redistribution increases as inequality grows, holding household income constant, suggesting that individuals tend to update their redistributive preferences in parallel and the gap in support for redistribution among income groups is small given the region’s sharp levels of economic inequality.
... First, to ensure that our results are not an artefact of using the three-item index as our dependent variable, we re-ran our final model (Model 4 in Table 2), using individual attitude items as the dependent variable in three separate models. As shown in Supplementary Table S2, both baseline associations and the cross-level interactions between class variables and the rate of government redistribution remain similar regardless of whether we use the index or any one of the three single items (see Hillen and Steiner, 2024 for a similar validation strategy showing consistent country-comparative results). ...
The theoretical proposition that social networks contribute to class divides in political attitudes has rarely been further developed or empirically scrutinized with individual-level data on a large cross-national scale. In this article, we theorize and empirically examine how the class profiles of personal networks may shape individual attitudes to income inequality from a country-comparative perspective. Using multilevel modeling and data from the ISSP Social Networks and Resources module, covering 29 countries, we find that having more family, friends, and acquaintances in upper-middle-class positions is associated with lower support for reducing inequality, while having more social ties to working-class positions is associated with higher support for reducing inequality. We also assess how these relationships differ across countries depending on the institutional context, finding that both own class location and the class profiles of personal networks are more strongly related to attitudes to income inequality in countries with a higher rate of government redistribution. The study provides new theoretical and empirical insights into the importance of personal networks' class profiles for shaping individual attitudes and structural ideological divisions linked to economic inequality, while also suggesting that social networks are key to understanding institutionally embedded distributive conflicts from a country-comparative perspective.
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Rising income inequality in the past decades has triggered an ongoing discussion about how the public perceives and evaluates this trend. Contrary to predictions derived from political economy models, one of the most common conclusions is that there is a lack of public response to rising income inequality. Using multilevel hybrid models and five waves of ISSP data, this article re-examines the core question whether the conclusion of a lacking popular response to rising inequality is indeed warranted. Results show that rising inequality is associated with increased perceived inequality, and both rising inequality and perceived inequality foster critical evaluations—that is, lead to greater concern for inequality and support for redistribution—challenging the notion of a lacking popular response to contemporary inequality dynamics. Furthermore, the analyses also underscore the importance of decomposing country-level effects by revealing substantial differences between cross-sectional and longitudinal effects, especially regarding attitudinal differences across income groups.
When surveyed, clear majorities express concern about inequality and view the government as responsible for addressing it. Scholars often interpret this view as popular support for redistribution. We question this interpretation, contending that many people have little grasp of what reducing inequality actually entails, and that this disconnect masks important variation in preferences over concrete policies. Using original survey and experimental US data, we provide systematic evidence in line with these conjectures. Furthermore, when asked about more concrete redistributive measures, support for government action changes significantly and aligns more closely with people's self-interest. These findings have implications for how egalitarian policies can be effectively communicated to the public, as well as methodological implications for the study of preferences on redistribution.
While economic inequality has risen in every affluent democracy in North America and Western Europe, the last three decades have also been characterized by falling or stagnating levels of state-led economic redistribution. Why have democratically accountable governments not done more to distribute top-income shares to citizens with low- and middle-income? Unequal Democracies offers answers to this question, bringing together contributions that focus on voters and their demands for redistribution with contributions on elites and unequal representation that is biased against less-affluent citizens. While large and growing bodies of research have developed around each of these perspectives, this volume brings them into rare dialogue. Chapters also incorporate analyses that center exclusively on the United States and those that examine a broader set of advanced democracies to explore the uniqueness of the American case and its contribution to comparative perspectives. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Stagnating incomes have been a widespread concern in advanced democracies over the past decades. However, despite a turn towards dynamic frameworks, the consequences of stagnation on political support for the welfare state are still unclear. This study introduces the distinction between “absolute” and “relative” income stagnation – that is, experiencing stagnating incomes over time (without reference to other groups) and in relative comparison to other groups – and explores how they shape citizens’ attitudes towards redistribution. I argue that absolute and relative stagnation have opposite effects on redistributive preferences. Contrary to political economy theories, I expect that low absolute income growth reduces demand for redistribution, because it reduces voters’ ability and willingness to afford welfare state policies. Support for this hypothesis is provided in an empirical analysis that combines novel estimates for absolute and relative income stagnation with longitudinal survey data on redistribution preferences in 14 advanced democracies between 1985 and 2018. The distinction between absolute and relative experiences has broader implications for comparative politics research and might contribute to explain why income stagnation and rising inequality have not led to higher political demand for redistributive welfare policy. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
Citizens’ support for redistribution varies largely between and within countries. An important empirical challenge in this field is the scarcity of comparative data, which this study overcomes by designing a novel time-series cross-sectional dataset that spans more than three decades in seven European countries. Using nearly 300 surveys and a dyadic ratios algorithm, we estimate aggregate redistributive preferences for each country, as well as for population strata within countries based on household income. We then ask to what extent support for redistribution varies across the rich and the poor. We find that citizens are not systematically becoming more reluctant toward or more supportive of redistribution. While redistributive preferences of the rich and the poor do not strictly move in parallel, there is no polarization between the two. Moreover, both the demand for redistribution and the preference gap between the rich and the poor evolve in a cyclical way.
Though the literature on perceptions of inequality and studies of ‘elites’ have identified the importance of meritocratic beliefs in legitimating inequality, little is known about the role of pay setting processes in sustaining ideals of meritocracy. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews with UK-based top income earners working mainly in finance, I analyse how top income earners perceive economic inequality. My study highlights the crucial role of performance pay for perceptions that top incomes are meritocratically deserved. Participants expressed the view that performance pay, an increasingly prevalent pay-setting practice, ensures that top incomes reflect a share of economic ‘value created’ for shareholders, clients or investors. Focusing on narrow, economic criteria of evaluation perceived as objective, the majority of respondents (‘performance pay meritocrats’) justified any income difference as deserved if it reflects economic contribution. Meanwhile, a minority of respondents (‘social reflexivists’) applied broader evaluative criteria including distributive justice and social contributions.
It is widely accepted that support for government intervention is highest among people in lower socioeconomic positions, during economic recessions and in less prosperous countries. However, the relationship between income inequality and attitudes toward government intervention is less clear. We contribute new insights to both questions by exploring how subjective household income, economic prosperity, and income inequality interact to influence attitudes. Using mixed‐effects and country fixed‐effects models fitted to data from 66 countries, we demonstrate that income inequality has a strong positive impact on attitudes toward government intervention in rich countries but no discernable effect in poor countries. Concomitantly, the impact of economic prosperity differs by level of inequality. It has little effect when income inequality is relatively low, a weakening effect as inequality rises, and no apparent effect when inequality is high. Consistent with these findings, the effect of subjective household income on attitudes toward government intervention is strongest in countries that are simultaneously very prosperous and highly unequal. Taken together, these findings suggest that if inequality continues to rise, especially in rich countries, public demand for social spending will eventually increase as well.
Despite the increasing popularity of comparative work on other-regarding preferences, the implications of different models of altruism are not always fully understood. This article analyzes different theoretical approaches to altruism and explores what empirical conclusions we should draw from them, paying particular attention to models of redistribution preferences where inequality explicitly triggers other-regarding motives for redistribution. While the main contribution of this article is to clarify the conclusions of these models, we also illustrate the importance of their distinct implications by analyzing Western European data to compare among them. We draw on individual-level data from the European Social Survey fielded between September 2002 and December 2013. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science Volume 21 is May 11, 2018. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
This article explores how preferences for redistribution among voters are affected by the structure of inequality. There are strong theoretical reasons to believe that some voter segments matter more than others, not least the so-called median-income voter, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to directly analysing distinct income groups’ redistributive preferences. In addition, while much of the previous literature has focused on broad levels of inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, it is likely that individuals respond to different types of inequality in different ways. To rectify this gap, we use data from the European Social Survey and Eurostat to examine the interactive effect of income deciles and various measures of inequality. Results suggest that inequality especially affects the middle-income groups – that is, the assumed median-income voters. Moreover, not all inequality matters equally: it is inequality vis-à-vis those around the 80th percentile that shapes redistributive preferences.
A vast literature suggests that economic inequality has important consequences for politics and public policy. Higher inequality is thought to increase demand for income redistribution in democracies and to discourage democratization and promote class conflict and revolution in dictatorships. Most such arguments crucially assume that ordinary people know how high inequality is, how it has been changing, and where they fit in the income distribution. Using a variety of large, cross-national surveys, we show that, in recent years, ordinary people have had little idea about such things. What they think they know is often wrong. Widespread ignorance and misperceptions emerge robustly, regardless of data source, operationalization, and measurement method. Moreover, perceived inequality—not the actual level—correlates strongly with demand for redistribution and reported conflict between rich and poor. We suggest that most theories about political effects of inequality need to be reframed as theories about effects of perceived inequality. JEL Codes: D3, D8, H2, H5, I3
What determines support among individuals for redistributive policies? Do individuals care about others when they assess the consequences of redistribution? This article proposes a model of other-regarding preferences for redistribution, which we term income-dependent altruism. Our model predicts that an individual's preferred level of redistribution is decreasing in income, increasing in inequality, and, more importantly, that the inequality effect is increasing in income. Thus, even though the rich prefer less redistribution than the poor, the rich are more responsive, in a positive way, to changes in inequality than are the poor. We contrast these results with several other prominent alternatives of other-regarding behavior. Using data for the United States from 1978 to 2010, we find significant support for our claims.
Why is the difference in redistribution preferences between the rich and the poor high in some countries and low in others? In this article, we argue that it has a lot to do with the rich and very little to do with the poor. We contend that while there is a general relative income effect on redistribution preferences, the preferences of the rich are highly dependent on the macrolevel of inequality. The reason for this effect is not related to immediate tax and transfer considerations but to a negative externality of inequality: crime. We will show that the rich in more unequal regions in Western Europe are more supportive of redistribution than the rich in more equal regions because of their concern with crime. In making these distinctions between the poor and the rich, the arguments in this article challenge some influential approaches to the politics of inequality.
Rising levels of income inequality in almost all industrialized countries as a consequence of globalization and de-industrialization might lead one to assume that voters will demand more redistribution and exert influence on their governments to set up redistributive programmes. However, this is not always the case. Citizens do not react directly to actual levels of inequality, as research on the attitudes towards inequality and redistribution has shown. In this article the complex relation between cross-national variation of inequality and public support for redistribution is analysed. The article draws on explanations from both a political economy perspective as well as drawing on comparative welfare regime research. While the former conceives cross-national variations in support for redistribution as the aggregate effect of a demand of rational actors reacting to country context, the latter focuses on the impact of institutions and culture superimposing itself over self-interest. The empirical analysis tests the explanations of both the political economy and welfare regimes approach. Since the article focuses on the impact of context variables on individual attitudes, a multilevel analysis is adopted. Data are taken from the 1999 ‘International Social Survey Program’ and are complemented by macro-economic variables. Based on the results, a model of contingent support for redistribution is put forward, where culturally influenced definitions are embedded in economic processes.
One prominent strand of the new growth theory has identified the political process as a potential channel to link high inequality
to lower long-term growth. Several authors have argued that (i) higher inequality causes higher demand for redistribution,
(ii) which leads to greater redistribution and higher taxes, and (iii) which is in turn harmful to growth. This article addresses
the first step of this argument, a proposition that has been widely accepted as a stylized fact. Using cross section data
for 26 countries from the ISSP's module on Social Inequality, it presents an empirical test that yields no support for the
idea that public support for redistribution rises with inequality across countries. This finding is attributed to the influence
of social justice norms that vary greatly between groups of culturally similar countries.
There is strong evidence that people exploit their bargaining power in competitive markets but not in bilateral bargaining
situations. There is also strong evidence that people exploit free-riding opportunities in voluntary cooperation games. Yet,
when they are given the opportunity to punish free riders, stable cooperation is maintained, although punishment is costly
for those who punish. This paper asks whether there is a simple common principle that can explain this puzzling evidence. We show that if some people care about equity the puzzles can be resolved. It turns
out that the economic environment determines whether the fair types or the selfish types dominate equilibrium behavior.
According to the ‘median-voter’ hypothesis, greater inequality in the market distribution of earnings or income tends to produce greater generosity in redistributive policy. We outline the steps in the causal chain specified by the hypothesis and attempt to assess these steps empirically. Prior studies focusing on cross-country variation have found little support for the median-voter model. We examine over-time trends in eight nations during the 1980s and 1990s. Here too the median-voter hypothesis appears to have little utility.
In a general equilibrium model of a labor economy, the size of government, measured by the share of income redistributed, is determined by majority rule. Voters rationally anticipate the disincentive effects of taxation on the labor-leisure choices of their fellow citizens and take the effect into account when voting. The share of earned income redistributed depends on the voting rule and on the distribution of productivity in the economy. Under majority rule, the equilibrium tax share balances the budget and pays for the voters' choices. The principal reasons for increased size of government implied by the model are extensions of the franchise that change the position of the decisive voter in the income distribution and changes in relative productivity. An increase in mean income relative to the income of the decisive voter increases the size of government.
Objectives
This study aims to contribute to our understanding of the relationship between income inequality, perceptions of income inequality, and support for redistribution. In particular, it asks whether income inequality affects support for redistribution by influencing perceptions of inequality.
Methods
This study combines the pay ratio measures from the International Social Survey Project with income inequality measures from the Standardized World Income Inequality Database. The analysis proceeds in three steps, asking whether (1) inequality is related to perceived inequality, (2) perceived inequality is related to preferences for inequality, and (3) perceived inequality is related to support for redistribution.
Results
Income inequality is unrelated to perceptions of inequality. Perceptions of inequality strongly predict preferred inequality, reinforcing the prior conclusion that anchoring effects likely cause this close relationship. Perceptions of inequality also predict support for redistribution. However, because actual inequality is unrelated to perceived inequality, there is no link between actual inequality and either preferred inequality or support for redistribution.
Conclusion
The overall pattern of results is consistent with the interpretation that perceptions of income inequality may be politically co‐determined with support for inequality and redistribution, instead of perceptions being mental antecedents of these attitudes.
In this review, we focus on political inequality in rich democracies. In the two main sections, we look at participation and representation, respectively. The former discusses whether rising income inequality and the weakening of trade unions have led to higher levels of inequality in participation. The latter looks at substantive and descriptive representation and asks how they might be linked. Research highlights that people with fewer individual resources participate much less than those with more resources, and collective organizations lose their ability to counter these trends. In terms of representation, the pattern is very similar. Not only are the opinions of decision-makers more congruent with those of the better off but policy choices also reflect their preferences more clearly. As the social distance between rulers and ruled increases, representative democracy gets more biased in favor of higher-status social groups.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 26 is June 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Economic inequality constitutes a defining challenge of our time and it remains puzzling why rising levels of inequality have not led to more redistribution. In this article a novel individual-level perspective is taken, with a focus on how much legislators and citizens agree on questions of redistribution and inequality, and what causes these mismatches. The study compares legislators’ views to a representative citizen sample in Switzerland. The results show considerable disagreement between the groups with legislators being more sceptical towards redistribution and seeing inequality as fairer outcome. The mismatch is only partially explained by legislators’ higher social status. Ideology plays a fundamental role as more polarisation according to ideological lines is found among elites and their attitudes are also more rooted in their ideology. In sum, the findings point to some underexplored angles of the puzzle of why not more redistribution has been observed and thus offer a valuable addition to the existing literature.
Whether parties matter for welfare policy is debated in comparative research. This article argues that one reason for dwindling partisan effects is that with the rising salience of cultural issues, political conflict has become increasingly two-dimensional. The argument expects parties to be more prone to shape welfare policy in ways expected by partisan theory if the salience of the economic policy dimension vis-à-vis the cultural dimension increases. To assess the relative salience of the dimensions, the article relies on parties’ emphases on economic issues compared to cultural issues from election manifestos. In a quantitative analysis of welfare benefits in 16 European countries between 1970 and 2011, partisan effects are shown to depend on the relative salience of the economic dimension in party competition: with increasing dominance of economic issues, the positive effect of left parties on welfare state generosity increases while partisan effects dissipate after elections dominated by cultural issues.
Political economy research commonly expects a positive relationship between income inequality and the demand for redistribution, which is increasingly attributed to inequality aversion grounded in norms and values. However, people are not averse to a proportion of inequality that fairly results from differences in individual merit. Therefore, this study argues that the effect of inequality crucially depends on the extent to which income fairness is realized. It is primarily unfair inequality, rather than overall inequality, that affects individual redistribution support. The argument is substantiated with an empirical quantification of unfair inequality that measures whether individuals have unequal returns to their labor-related merits. Multilevel models using repeated cross-sections show that this quantification of unfair inequality can explain both within- and between-country variance in redistribution preferences and that it is a better predictor than overall inequality. The results suggest that public opinion cannot be inferred directly from the overall level of inequality.
Income inequality has risen throughout advanced rich democracies. Why does the public not demand more redistribution? This article builds on the literature of social justice norms, which shows that besides individual financial motives also socially engrained beliefs about poverty influence opinions about redistribution. Based on a multilevel analysis of public opinion data from 33 countries, the article shows that lower levels of support for redistribution are not driven by political polarization between the rich and the poor, but it is rooted in deeply seated societal norms among all income groups. The unfortunate implication of this finding is that simple, short-run policy is unlikely, which could mitigate existing economic imbalances.
Inequality is on the rise: gains have been concentrated with a small elite, while most have seen their fortunes stagnate or fall. Despite what scholars and journalists consider a worrying trend, there is no evidence of growing popular concern about inequality. In fact, research suggests that citizens in unequal societies are less concerned than those in more egalitarian societies. How to make sense of this paradox? I argue that citizens’ consent to inequality is explained by their growing conviction that societal success is reflective of a meritocratic process. Drawing on 25 years of International Social Survey Program data, I show that rising inequality is legitimated by the popular belief that the income gap is meritocratically deserved: the more unequal a society, the more likely its citizens are to explain success in meritocratic terms, and the less important they deem nonmeritocratic factors such as a person’s family wealth and connections.
Mainstream parties in Western Europe are increasingly struggling to hold together their base of support. As a lens for exploring this changing electoral landscape, this article focuses on the growing share of the electorate that is cross-pressured between conservative and progressive attitudes on economic and cultural issues. It argues that a stable asymmetry characterizes Western European mass attitudes: while support for the left is common among voters with progressive attitudes on both issues, it is enough to be conservative on one issue to turn right. Analyzing survey data collected from 1990 to 2017, the study shows that cross-pressures are resolved in favor of the right and examines the trade-offs this poses to center-right parties. These findings contribute to debates on electoral dealignment and realignment and shed light on the electoral choices of the center-right.
Objective
This article documents wide‐ranging revisions to the Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID), which seeks to maximize the comparability of income inequality estimates for the broadest possible coverage of countries and years.
Methods
Two k‐fold cross‐validations, by observation and by country, are used to evaluate the SWIID's success in predicting the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), recognized in the field as setting the standard for comparability.
Results
The cross‐validations indicate that the new SWIID's estimates and their uncertainty are even more accurate than previous versions, extending its advantage in comparability over alternate income inequality data sets.
Conclusion
Given its superior coverage and comparability, the SWIID remains the optimum source of data for broadly cross‐national research on income inequality.
Parties with left‐wing positions on economic issues and right‐wing (i.e., authoritarian) positions on cultural issues have been historically largely absent from the supply side of the policy space of Western European democracies. Yet, many citizens hold such left‐authoritarian issue attitudes. This article addresses the hypotheses that left‐authoritarian citizens are less likely to vote, less satisfied with the democratic process and have lower levels of political trust when there is a left‐authoritarian supply gap. Using data for 14 Western European countries from the European Social Survey 2008 in the main analysis, it is shown that left‐authoritarians are less likely to vote and exhibit lower levels of satisfaction with democracy and political trust. A supplementary analysis of national election studies from Finland before and after the electoral breakthrough of the left‐authoritarian True Finns Party in 2011 indicates that whether left‐authoritarians participate less and believe less in the efficacy of voting is contingent on the presence of a strong left‐authoritarian party. This study illuminates how constrained party supply in a two‐dimensional policy space can affect voter turnout as well as political support, and has broader implications for the potential further rise of left‐authoritarian challenger parties.
We revisit a longstanding hypothesis that the public become more supportive of redistributive policy as income inequality rises. Previous tests of this hypothesis using various forms of general least squares regressions are inconclusive. We suggest improvements and alternatives to these tests. Using the World Inequality Data and International Social Survey Program we analyze 91 surveys in 18 countries. We incorporate three alternative measures of income inequality, including a measure of liberalization as a known cause of increases in income inequality. We also employ two alternative test formats that arguably reflect the data generating model better than a least squares regression. The first is vector-autoregression aiming to account for path dependency of public opinion and income inequality, and the endogeneity between them. Next is qualitative comparative analysis to capture sets of conditions that collectively should have led to inequality having an impact on public opinion. Finally, we run our regression models separately for low and high socio-economic strata. In all tests we find no measurable impact of income inequality on support for redistribution. From a macro-perspective we argue that this suggests ruling out a general effect that exists across space and time, and focusing instead on theory to explain why there should not be a general effect. Some arguments suggest the public are normatively opposed to what sounds like ‘handouts’. We therefore discuss model specification via theory, but also Type II errors, statistical power and the limitations of our conclusions.
This article argues that public opinion regarding the legitimacy of income differences is influenced by actual income inequality. When income differences are perceived to be high, the public thinks of larger income inequality as legitimate. The phenomenon is explained by the system justification motivation and other psychological processes that favor existing social arrangements. Three experiments show that personal experiences of inequality as well as information regarding national-level income inequality can affect which income differences are thought of as legitimate. A fourth experiment shows that the system justification motivation is a cause of this effect. These results can provide an empirical basis for future studies to assume that the public reacts to inequality with adapted expectations, not increased demands for redistribution.
This article investigates the dynamics of support for income redistribution in Europe. With European Social Survey data spanning 2006 to 2012, it assesses whether the Great Recession resulted in substantial parallelism or increasing polarisation in preference change across various sub-publics. After introducing hypotheses based on claims that social groups are affected differently by economic insecurity, the article proceeds in two empirical sections. First, whereas prior research suggests that hard times fuel diverging attitudinal patterns, it is found that income groups, ideological groups and educational groups did not shift differently over time during the first years of the crisis, thus providing strong evidence for the ‘parallel publics’ hypothesis in the European context and in times of economic turmoil. Next, the article addresses the extent to which change in aggregate support for redistribution came from changes in small minorities of the population, supposed to be more responsive to their economic environment. Using multilevel analysis, it is shown that the most educated significantly contributed to the overall change more than the others. As a result, they may have been partly driving the economic mood during the first years of the Great Recession.
Using data from the World Values Survey and national-level indicators for 24 modern democracies, we assess the influence of social class and economic inequality on preferences for government responsibility. We improve on previous research by using multilevel models that account for differences in attitudes both within (i.e., over time) and across countries. Our findings are consistent with the economic self-interest hypothesis. Specifically, working class individuals, who tend to gain the most from government intervention because of their low and often more precarious economic position, are more likely than others to support government intervention. We also find a positive relationship between national-level income inequality and support for government intervention. As income inequality rises, its social ills tend to be more pervasive, resulting in public opinion becoming more supportive of governments taking responsibility for their citizens. We further demonstrate that inequality moderates the relationship between social class and attitudes. Although the effect of income inequality is positive for all social classes, attitudes across social classes become more similar as inequality rises. © 2015 Canadian Sociological Association/La Société canadienne de sociologie.
Income inequality has been rising substantially over the past few decades in the United States, making it the most unequal
of advanced industrialized democracies. This transformation has had enormous social and political consequences. In this research
note, I assess the influence of both income inequality and the changing structure of income inequality on Americans’ public
policy mood. Numerous political theorists suggest that rising inequality and the shift in the distribution of income to those
at the top should lead to increasing support for liberal policies. But recent evidence contradicts these theories. I empirically
evaluate a number of competing theoretical predictions about the relationship between inequality and public preferences. In
general, the evidence supports the claim that rising inequality has been a force promoting conservatism in the American public.
One proposition of the popular median-voter hypothesis is a positive relationship between demand for redistribution and levels
of inequality. However, empirical evidence of this relationship is scarce. A major shortcoming of previous research is that
it is either cross-sectional, which casts general doubt on the causal nature of the estimates, or it is longitudinal and based
on aggregated data, which makes it difficult to control for compositional effects or to analyze the individual-level implications
of the hypothesis. This article estimates cross-sectional and longitudinal effects of inequality, while simultaneously controlling
for the composition of data at the individual level. The article finds a positive within-country effect of inequality on demand
for redistribution but no such relationship between countries. This finding points to an unobserved variable at the country
level. Following the literature, the article considers welfare regimes as a possible factor capturing these unobserved country
differences. However, none of the existing welfare regime typologies performs well in terms of capturing unobserved heterogeneity
or in general explanatory power. All in all, the article finds robust support for the proposition that demand for redistribution
is positively related to inequality, but it casts doubt on the utility of cross-sectional analysis and the welfare regime
approach.
There has been great interest in the relationship between immigration and the welfare state in recent years, and particularly since Alesina and Glaeser's (2004) influential work. Following literatures on solidarity and fractionalization, race in the U. S. welfare state, and anti-immigrant sentiments, many contend that immigration undermines public support for social policy. This study analyzes three measures of immigration and six welfare attitudes using 1996 and 2006 International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data for 17 affluent democracies. Based on multi-level and two-way fixed-effects models, our results mostly fail to support the generic hypothesis that immigration undermines public support for social policy. The percent foreign born, net migration, and the 10-year change in the percent foreign born all fail to have robust significant negative effects on welfare attitudes. There is evidence that the percent foreign born significantly undermines the welfare attitude that government "should provide a job for everyone who wants one." However, there is more robust evidence that net migration and change in percent foreign born have positive effects on welfare attitudes. We conclude that the compensation and chauvinism hypotheses provide greater potential for future research, and we critically consider other ways immigration could undermine the welfare state. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that factors other than immigration are far more important for public support of social policy.
Why some individuals, who would clearly benefit from redistribution, do not vote for parties offering redistributive policies is an old puzzle of redistributive politics. Recent work in political economy offers an explanation based on the interplay between religious identity and party policies. Strategic parties bundle conservative moral policies with anti-redistribution positions inducing individuals with a strong religious identity to vote based on moral rather than economic preferences. I test this theory using microlevel data on individuals’ vote choices in 24 recent multiparty elections in 15 Western European countries. I use an integrated model of religion, economic and moral preferences, and vote choice to show that religious individuals possess less liberal economic preferences, which shapes their vote choice against redistributive parties. This holds even for individuals who would clearly benefit from redistribution. Moreover, the redistributive vote of religious individuals is primarily based on economic not moral preferences.
This paper analyses the effect of macroeconomic and social conditions on the demand for redistribution. Using a synthetic cohort design to generate panel data at the level of socio-demographic groups, analysis of fives waves of data from the European Social Survey (2002–2010) shows that differences across countries in macroeconomic and social conditions have an effect on the demand for redistribution. Consistent with theoretical expectations, economic growth generates a lower demand for redistribution, while higher income inequality generates a higher demand. By contrast, differences across countries in unemployment levels and social expenditure are unrelated to the demand for redistribution. The analysis also suggests that empirical results depend to a considerable extent on the assumptions underlying different methodological approaches.
Theory: Democratic accountability requires that the public be reasonably well-informed about what policymakers actually do. Such a public would adjust its preferences for ''more'' or ''less'' policy in response to policy outputs themselves. In effect, the public would behave like a thermostat; when the actual policy ''temperature'' differs from the preferred policy temperature, the public would send a signal to adjust policy accordingly, and once sufficiently adjusted, the signal would stop. Hypotheses: In domains where policy is clearly defined and salient to the public, changes in the public's preferences for more policy activity are negatively related to changes in policy. Methods: A thermostatic model of American public preferences for spending on defense and a set of five social programs is developed and then tested using time series regression analysis. Results: Changes in public preferences for more spending reflect changes in both the preferred levels of spending and spending decisions themselves. Most importantly, changes in preferences are negatively related to spending decisions, whereby the public adjusts its preferences for more spending downward (upward) when appropriations increase (decrease). Thus, consistent with the Eastonian model, policy outputs do ''feed back'' on public inputs, at least in the defense spending domain and across a set of social spending domains.
This article employs multilevel modeling to assess the importance of income inequality on the demand for redistribution in a sample of 22 European countries. According to standard political economy models of redistribution – notably the Meltzer-Richard model – inequality and demand for redistribution should be positively linked. However, existing empirical research has disputed this claim. The main advantages of this article is that demand for redistribution is measured at the individual level, and that the relevant interaction between inequality and own income is considered. The main findings are that inequality is positively associated with demand for redistribution, and that the median income person is sensitive to the level of inequality. These findings are robust to the inclusion of a range of relevant control variables. The results are relevant in relation to the increase in inequalities in many European countries, and especially relevant to the current debate about the importance of directly observable differences in public preferences for social policy outcomes.
In 2001 and 2003, the Bush administration engineered two enormous tax cuts primarily benefiting very wealthy taxpayers. Most Americans supported these tax cuts. I argue that they did so not because they were indifferent to economic inequality, but because they largely failed to connect inequality and public policy. Three out of every four people polled said that the difference in incomes between rich people and poor people has increased in the past 20 years, and most of them added that that is a bad thingeven in the case of the estate tax, which only affects the wealthiest one or two percent of taxpayers. Public opinion in this instance was ill informed, insensitive to some of the most important implications of the tax cuts, and largely disconnected from (or misconnected to) a variety of relevant values and material interests. a
Adopting a cross-regional and global perspective, this article critically evaluates one of the core assertions of political economy approaches to welfare—that support for redistribution is inversely related to income. We hypothesize that economic self-interest gives way to more uniform support for redistribution in the interest of ensuring that basic or relative needs are met in less developed and highly unequal societies. To test this hypothesis, we analyze individual-level surveys combined with country-level indicators for more than 50 countries between 1984 and 2004. Our analysis shows that individual-level income does not systematically explain support for redistribution in countries with low levels of economic development or high levels of income inequality. These findings challenge the universality of the assumption of economic self-interest in shaping preferences for redistribution that has been so pervasive in the literature.
This article assesses the influence of income inequality on the public's policy mood. Recent work has produced divergent perspectives on the relationship between inequality, public opinion, and government redistribution. One group of scholars suggests that unequal representation of different income groups reproduces inequality as politicians respond to the preferences of the rich. Another group of scholars pays relatively little attention to distributional outcomes but shows that government is generally just as responsive to the poor as to the rich. Utilizing theoretical insights from comparative political economy and time-series data from 1952 to 2006, supplemented with cross-sectional analysis where appropriate, we show that economic inequality is, in fact, self-reinforcing, but that this is fully consistent with the idea that government tends to respond equally to rich and poor in its policy enactments.
Over the past three decades the effects of globalization and denationalization have created a division between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in Western Europe. This study examines the transformation of party political systems in six countries (Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK) using opinion surveys, as well as newly collected data on election campaigns. The authors argue that, as a result of structural transformations and the strategic repositioning of political parties, Europe has observed the emergence of a tripolar configuration of political power, comprising the left, the moderate right, and the new populist right. They suggest that, through an emphasis on cultural issues such as mass immigration and resistance to European integration, the traditional focus of political debate - the economy - has been downplayed or reinterpreted in terms of this new political cleavage. This new analysis of Western European politics will interest all students of European politics and political sociology.
International Social Survey Programme: Social Inequality IV - ISSP 2009. GESIS Data Archive Cologne
- Issp Research Group
International Social Survey Programme: Social Inequality V - ISSP 2019. GESIS Cologne. ZA7600 Data file Version 3
- Issp Research Group
GDP per capita (constant 2015 US$)
- World Bank
International Social Survey Programme: Social Inequality III - ISSP 1999. GESIS Data Archive Cologne. ZA3430 Data file Version 1
- Issp Research Group