Does Social Inequality Outweigh Individual Relative Wealth in Driving Support for Redistribution?
Johannes Giesecke, Felix Hartmann, Macartan Humphreys, Ferdinand Geissler, Heike Klüver – 2023
Despite an increases in socio-economic inequality in most western democracies there is no corresponding increase in demand for redistribution. Under what conditions do citizens support more redistribution and punish incumbent government for inequality? How do information benchmarks about inequality in other countries influence these evaluations? Theory: We study whether voters view the wealth inequality primarily in sociotropic or egotropic terms. We separate the issue of inequality in society (“sociotropic inequality”) from the resulting wealth levels of individual (“egotropic inequality”). Gap: Studies typically inform participants about their relative positions in the distribution and measure the demand for redistribution. For example, Hvidberg, Kreiner, and Stantcheva (2020) show that lower-ranked respondents tend to think they are ranked higher than they truly are, while higher-ranked respondents believe they are ranked lower. We inform participant about the level of inequality in their society relative to other countries as well as their counterfactual individual wealth if they would life in a different society.