The distribution of wealth in the United States and countries around the world is highly skewed. How does visible economic inequality affect well-off individuals' support for redistribution? Using a placebo-controlled field experiment, I randomize the presence of poverty-stricken people in public spaces frequented by the affluent. Passersby were asked to sign a petition calling for greater redistribution through a "millionaire's tax." Results from 2,591 solicitations show that in a real-world-setting exposure to inequality decreases affluent individuals' willingness to redistribute. The finding that exposure to inequality begets inequality has fundamental implications for policymakers and informs our understanding of the effects of poverty, inequality, and economic segregation. Confederate race and socioeconomic status, both of which were randomized, are shown to interact such that treatment effects vary according to the race, as well as gender, of the subject.inequality | redistribution | field experiment | political science | taxation T he distribution of wealth in many countries across the globe is highly skewed. In the United States, the gap between the top 1% of earners and everyone else was wider in 2012 than any time since before the Great Depression (1) and is a pervasive social and political phenomenon (2). With this phenomenon comes visible manifestations of inequality, which affect social interactions from cooperation (3) to conflict (4). However, very little is known about how direct exposure to inequality in everyday settings-such as poverty and homelessness in relatively wealthy neighborhoods-shapes human behavior. Isolating this causal effect is challenging because of selective sorting. To overcome this difficulty, I experimentally manipulate exposure to inequality that occurs on sidewalks and street corners. Using a randomized placebo-controlled field experiment, I show momentary passive "contact" with a poverty stricken person in an affluent public place can change people's willingness to actively support redistributive policies.Economic inequality is an abstract concept that is difficult to concretely portray without the help of numbers, graphs, or words. Understanding the implications of exposure to inequality as a personal experience, rather than as an impersonal abstraction, requires the manipulation of microlevel contextual features. I evoke everyday inequality by placing poor individuals in a place of affluence. (Using a separate, online experiment, detailed in SI Appendix, I show that subjects describe images of the poor in affluent settings as depicting inequality. Thus, I use the terms "exposure to inequality" and "poverty in an affluent setting" interchangeably.)Those with the means to live and shop in such neighborhoods are more likely than the average citizen to participate in politics and donate to political causes and thus wield a disproportionate influence over politics and policy (2).The experimental intervention created a microenvironment of inequality that was both highly reali...

Violent protests are dramatic political events, yet we know little about the effect of these events on political behavior. While scholars typically treat violent protests as deliberate acts undertaken in pursuit of specific goals, due to a lack of appropriate data and difficulty in causal identification, there is scant evidence of whether riots can actually increase support for these goals. Using geocoded data, we analyze measures of policy support before and after the 1992 Los Angeles riot—one of the most high-profile events of political violence in recent American history—that occurred just prior to an election. Contrary to some expectations from the academic literature and the popular press, we find that the riot caused a marked liberal shift in policy support at the polls. Investigating the sources of this shift, we find that it was likely the result of increased mobilization of both African American and white voters. Remarkably, this mobilization endures over a decade later.

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How does local economic inequality affect the preferences and behaviors of the poor? We present a placebo-controlled field experiment conducted in Soweto, South Africa, that randomly varies exposure to inequality in low socio-economic settings. We find that willingness to sign a petition that calls for higher taxes on the wealthy increases in the presence of a high-status car. To probe the generality of the experimental finding, we combine a representative geo-referenced survey with neighborhood-level census-derived measures of local inequality, a proxy for direct encounters with tangible reminders of economic inequality. Observationally, exposure to inequality among the poor is associated with an increase in support for taxing the wealthy.