If given the opportunity, would citizens in highly unequal countries choose to soak the rich through redistributive taxes? While it is widely assumed that inequality would trigger a desire to soak the rich, recent evidence suggests that such redistributive preferences are not so straightforward in the world’s most unequal regions. In this paper, we explain this puzzle by drawing and testing a new conceptualization of redistributive preferences. In some political contexts - even where inequality is very high – individuals will not perceive a necessary trade-off where citizens must pay taxes in order for the poor to benefit from social spending. We test this expectation through the analysis of a conjoint experiment embedded into an original survey conducted in Mexico City and Bogota. We find that citizens of all income levels in both cities have strong preferences against taxing the poor, but only citizens in Bogota would choose to tax the rich. Their counterparts in Mexico City express little desire to tax any income bracket, despite their eagerness to help the poor.
We test in the laboratory four mechanisms through which group identification might affect redistribution in representative democracies. From the voters’ side, group identification can give rise to a preference for own group payoffs, for electing an own group candidate, and could be used to assess more accurately a candidate’s character. From the candidates’ perspective, identity might affect the optimal campaign platforms. There is evidence to support all four channels. Consistent, with Klor and Shayo (2009), we find the own group payoff motivation works against redistribution when the majority group is richer than the minority one. The other mechanisms, however, combine to make redistribution depend on a hitherto unrecognized factor: the political representation of the minority group. Indeed, we find that the post-redistribution economic inequality is decreasing in the number of minority candidates. Importantly, this is not a mere consequence of minority candidates favoring redistribution; voters also vote more for redistribution when it is proposed by minority candidates compared with when proposed by a majority one.
Do voters see credit supply as an acceptable substitute for welfare? The ‘demand side’ of credit expansions in advanced democracies has raised academic interest and come under increased scrutiny. And while previous scholarship has provided important insights from observational data showing that better access to financial markets is associated with lower levels of redistributive demands, those studies face two important caveats: (1) they cannot rule out concerns about endogeneity and (2) they rarely distinguish between the ‘insurance’ and ‘redistribution’ role of the welfare state.
We add to this literature by using a survey-experimental design that warrants a cleaner identification strategy to verify the existence of a causal credit access effect on preferences for redistribution. We conduct a conjoint analysis in the United Kingdom that allows to trace who is willing to accept facilitated access to bank credit as a substitute for the welfare state; it moreover enables us analyze whether voters see bank credit is as a substitute for redistributive policies or for social insurance aspects of the welfare state.
Standard behavioral models predict that income inequality would lead to an increase in concern with inequality and support for redistribution. Yet, evidence for this expectation is mixed. On one hand, some scholars show that low income individuals or those living in more unequal neighbourhoods or localities are more concerned with inequality than those who are not. On the other hand, there is evidence that income differences are generally perceived as being legitimate by the public. Drawing on system justification theory, which suggests that most individuals are motivated to believe to perceive the social system as fair, some showed that individuals habituate to rise in income inequality by adjusting their expectations of fairness, which leads them to be even more accepting of inequalities. These studies use different data, methods, and different dependent variables that prevent us from arriving at conclusions about the effects of income inequality on individual attitudes. Using online survey experiments from nationally representative samples from the United States and the United Kingdom and direct measures of concern with income inequality, I test both propositions simultaneously.
Economic inequality constitutes a defining challenge of our time and it remains puzzling to scholars why rising levels of inequality have not lead to more redistributive policies. However, a neglected aspect of this puzzle is to focus on politicians and their understanding of inequality. By studying political elites and thus in essence those that take the decisions about redistribution or not, we get leverage at the question whether political elites also hold misperceptions about inequality and which variables are key in explaining their evaluation of inequality.
In this paper, we study the effect of social status on redistributive preferences among politicians. Taking federalized Switzerland as a case, we focus on cantonal MPs as the cantons have far-reaching power over the allocation of welfare and are thus the ideal case to study. In a survey experiment, we manipulate politicians’ perceptions of the socioeconomic hierarchy and their place in it to study the effects of social position on a range of redistributive policy preferences.