Conference Agenda

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.

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.

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.

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.