Paper prepared for the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association
In most liberal democracies, high levels economic inequality persist. And yet, there is no systematic evidence that inequality leads to redistributive policies or public demands for such policies. This leads to a paradox: Most citizens realize that inequality exists and is undesirable, while at first sight, little is done about it. To understand this paradox, this study outlines two perspectives by leveraging original experimental evidence of 8 European countries. When faced with high and rising inequality, do citizens indeed connect this to support for redistributive policies? We build up on theory which suggests that citizens have distinct preferences regarding social policies which redistribute to the poor, versus those that take from the rich. The first experiment introduces a conjoint analysis, probing respondents to make trade-offs between various redistributive policies to tackle inequality. This allows us to examine if citizens logically connect concerns about inequality with support for inequality-reducing policies. Second, we further examine fairness concerns regarding the rich. In a second experiment, respondents are presented with survey vignettes that vary the causes of inequality. This experiment aims to gauge if citizens update their redistributive preferences based on different causal attributions of wealth. Results from pilot data suggest that citizens indeed couple inequality with support for inequality-reducing policies, but only when they deem inequality to be ‘unfair’. For example, citizens only support taxing the rich if their wealth was created through favourable public policies.
Silke Goubin, KU Leuven
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