Attitudes to Inequalities: Citizen Deliberation About the (Re-)Distribution of Income and Wealth in Four Welfare State Regimes

Strong Welfare States Do Not Intensify Public Support for Income Redistribution, but Even Reduce It among the Prosperous: A Multilevel Analysis of Public Opinion in 30 Countries

“…As background to assessing redistribution attitudes, analysis of inequality images reveals that people have veridical perceptions of the shape of inequality: Compared to residents of market-oriented countries, the general publics of strong welfare states accurately perceive their countries as having little inequality. Note that the demonstrated veridicality of perceptions of inequality imagery is in contrast to prior research suggesting that people underestimate the numerical magnitude of income inequalities [136,137], but consistent with prior research on 4 northern European countries suggesting that broad inequality perceptions are closely aligned with actual income inequality [49]. It seems likely that people correctly perceive the shape of the income distribution, but underestimate the magnitude of high incomes.…”

“…Analysis of European Social Survey data shows moderate alignment of welfare state regime and individuals' support for welfare [9,10]. Analysis using World Values Survey data and International Social Survey Program data demonstrates that deservingness criteria pattern moderately by welfare regime and that this pattern correlates highly with welfare-state attitudes [12] with deservingness criteria playing a more important role in the UK than in Germany, Demark, or Slovenia [49] which could imply either Anglo-Celtic cultural causality or the influence of the strength of the welfare state. The net progressivity of the nation's tax-and-benefit policy package may also play a role [46].…”

Deliberating Inequality: A Blueprint for Studying the Social Formation of Beliefs about Economic Inequality

“…That is, we draw on deliberation for its ability to reveal the social dynamics undergirding the formation of people's opinions (Nino, 1996). We see these groups as approximating, however imperfectly, the kind of interactive settings within which individuals process information and develop beliefs about inequality in real social life (see Burchardt, 2014;Davis et al, 2020;Heuer et al, 2018;Zimmerman et al, 2018). This closer approximation of the social world, we believe, means that deliberative groups offer a better picture of the development of inequality beliefs than do less situated techniques-such as survey experiments with individual participants.…”

Envy of the rich is one reason that Americans favor reducing income inequality

“…Bandura 2018, Fishbein andAjzen 2010). Hence our evaluations of whether income inequality is too low or too high are likely to affect our policy preferences and political behavior (Arsenio 2018, Fernandez and Jaime-Castillo 2018, Heuer, Mau and Zimmermann 2018, Ven and Zeelenberg 2019, so understanding the sources of our inequality evaluations can have broader implications Brady 1999, Manza andBrooks 2012), for example via the comparison, status, and power dimensions of Jasso's unified theory (Jasso 2008).…”

“…Public opinion evaluating the current distribution of income is also of practical importance because reduction of income inequality -whether by enhancement of the capacities of the disadvantaged or by tax and transfer (redistribution) programs or by other means --forms the focus of a great deal of governments' activities, even in countries with relatively limited welfare states, such as the United States (Beramendi andRehm 2016, Heuer, Mau andZimmermann 2018), although some approaches are much more successful than others (Beramendi andRehm 2016, Brady andBostic 2015) and some government actions in this domain have unintended consequences Hommerich 2019, Evans andKelley 2018a). Evaluations of income inequality are of both theoretical and practical importance because some evidence suggests that public opinion on inequality may shape governmental policy and institutional arrangements (Jo and Choi 2019, Kelly and Enns 2010, Weakliem, Andersen and Heath 2005, although there is also evidence for causality in the other direction (see the thorough reviews of this literature in Breznau 2017, Mettler andSorelle 2014), and evidence in some domains for a citizen-government disconnect (Mettler 2018).…”