New methods and data sources confirm that income and wealth inequalities have continued to increase over the last three decades. The level of perceived inequality influences the demand for economic redistribution, but it is not the only factor at work in the mental map of attitudes towards redistribution. Beliefs about the source of inequality are key to understanding the desired level of redistribution. People who believe that inequality arises from differences in effort will tend to demand less redistribution, while those who believe that inequality is due to differences in circumstances beyond the control of individuals will tend to demand more redistribution. Similarly, earlier studies regularly found that political ideology was an important predictor of attitudes towards redistribution, but recent evidence suggests that both those who consider themselves on the left and those who consider themselves on the right advocate more redistribution.
This call seeks to explain with ESS data and other international values surveys (WVS, EVS, ISSP, etc.) new trends in predictors of attitudes towards redistribution. Particular emphasis is placed on cross-national studies using ESS data and other surveys together with time-varying national statistics. These statistics are primarily variables about the level of different forms economic inequality and parameters of the tax schedule (such as tax incidence, progressivity, tax rate levels, etc. Two special ESS modules about fairness and social justice views of ESS fielded in 2008 and 2016 are also of key importance for this call as they allow including several beliefs on the analysis of attitudes towards redistribution across time and country.
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Individual Experience Matters: How the Persistence of Personal Experience of Long-term Unemployment Impacts Support for Income Redistribution in Europe
Ivan Petrúšek
Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic
Previous studies almost unanimously conclude that being unemployed or losing a job is positively associated with support for income redistribution. This article questions this prevalent empirical evidence. Using data from the first nine rounds of the European Social Survey and almost thirty countries, I argue that the personal experience of a prolonged unemployment spell (longer than three months) is a much stronger correlate of redistribution support than simply being unemployed. When controlling for this adverse personal experience, unemployment status has a much smaller effect on pro-redistributive attitudes than previously argued. I claim that the scarring effect of experience with long-term unemployment has a more substantial impact on support for income redistribution than the effect of being frictionally unemployed due to voluntary job switching. In particular, this research argues that when someone quits a job and is frictionally unemployed, this represents a qualitatively different experience from being fired or laid off, thus creating no incentive to increase redistribution support.
Furthermore, I demonstrate that the longer this personal experience with unemployment spell, the stronger the association with redistribution support. The scarring effect of long-term unemployment experience lasts beyond re-employment, as employed individuals who were previously unemployed for more than a year are much more pro-redistributive than employed individuals without this adverse experience. However, the effect size of experience with long-term unemployment is not homogenous across European countries. Structural unemployment levels negatively moderate the effect of experience with long-term unemployment. Personal experience with long-term unemployment has a significantly stronger effect on pro-redistributive attitudes in countries with low levels of structural unemployment. When there are many unemployed people in a country, region, or a particular reference group, an individual's unemployment represents a smaller deviation from the established social norm. Being unemployed and having experience with long-term unemployment is thus associated with less social stigmatisation in contexts with high structural unemployment.
It’s the Middle that Matters? Income Class Coalitions in Support of Redistributive Welfare Reform
Tijs Laenen, Femke Roosma, Peter Achterberg
Tilburg University, the Netherlands
Many well-established theories argue that welfare state policies create, and are created by, support coalitions between different income classes. Empirically, however, relatively little attention has been paid to the coalitions forged by the group that matters most according to these theories: the middle class. To address that research gap, this article investigates the income class coalitions underlying popular support for redistributive welfare reform, going in the direction of either a fully means-tested welfare state or a universal basic income. Using data from the 2016/17 European Social Survey, we confirm the long-standing hypothesis that middle-income earners form a coalition with high-income earners against means-tested welfare provision. With regard to universal basic income, however, income differences prove considerably smaller. Furthermore, contrary to much prior research, our findings do not corroborate predictions from policy feedback theory that support coalitions between different income classes are shaped by the progressivity of countries’ existing tax-transfer systems.
Perceived income inequality, perceived unfairness and subjective social status in Europe
Gábor Hajdu
HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, Hungary
This paper analyses the relationship between perceived income inequality and subjective social status, as well as the moderating role of the perceived fairness of income distribution. I use data from four waves of the “Social Inequality” module of the International Social Survey Programme (28 European countries, 70,000 individuals). In these surveys, respondents estimated the earnings of individuals working in different occupations and were also asked about their views on what people in these occupations should earn. Using respondents’ earnings estimates, I calculated a measure of subjective inequality perception similar to the standard Gini coefficient. The measure of unfairness in income distribution is derived from the difference between perceived and legitimate levels of inequality.
I show that individuals who perceive higher levels of inequality tend to rate their social status lower than those who perceive lower levels of inequality. The effect size is relatively large: a one standard deviation change in perceived inequality is associated with a 5% standard deviation change in subjective social status. Given that the regression models controlled for respondents' social status using a comprehensive set of variables (income, education, labour market status, occupation, etc.) and also included country-year fixed effects to (indirectly) account for the level of objective inequality, these results can be explained mechanisms beyond economic self-interest and objective income inequality. These may include increased frequency of social comparison, increased feelings of relative deprivation or increased aspirations.
Furthermore, the negative association between perceived inequality and subjective status is moderated by the perceived unfairness of income distribution: the greater the discrepancy between perceived and preferred income inequality, the stronger the negative association. Consistent with previous literature, there is considerable variation in the effects by income, education, and region. Individuals with lower status (lower income or less education) and from post-communist countries are more influenced by income inequality.
The results show that, beyond objective income inequality, perceived inequality and the fairness of income distribution also has consequences for subjective social status. Notably, unfair inequality matters more than fair inequality. It is worth noting that 80% of the respondents perceive either a high or a moderate level of unfairness. I.e., for the majority, perceived inequality is strongly negatively associated with subjective social status. Furthermore, perceived inequality is negatively associated with subjective social status, even when it is perceived as less unfair, suggesting that even slightly unfair inequality can be detrimental, albeit to a lesser extent than highly unfair inequality.
Preferences for redistribution and wealth inequality around the world
Javier Olivera1,2, Francesco Andreoli2,3
1National Bank of Belgium; 2Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research; 3University of Verona
This paper studies to what extent wealth inequality, and particularly top wealth shares, affect preferences for redistribution. We utilize various international values surveys from 122 countries in the period 1995-2021, amounting to almost 1.2 million observations, and find that increases in top wealth shares lead to larger preferences for redistribution, whilst the level of accomplished redistribution in the country is negatively related with these preferences. In a subset of countries with available data to control for the POUM hypothesis, fairness beliefs household wealth proxies, we still find a positive relation of top wealth shares with preferences for redistribution. This relationship is stable and robust to a variety of checks, including the use of instrumental variables related to macro-prudential policies that may affect the level of wealth inequality in the country.
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