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

Abstract

In most contemporary societies, people underestimate the extent of economic inequality, resulting in lower support for taxation and redistribution than might be expressed by better informed citizens. We still know little, however, about how understandings of inequality arise, and therefore about where perceptions and misperceptions of it might come from. This methodological article takes one step toward filling this gap by developing a research design—a blueprint—to study how people’s understandings of wealth and income inequality develop through social interaction. Our approach combines insights from recent scholarship highlighting the socially situated character of inequality beliefs with those of survey experimental work testing how information about inequality changes people’s understandings of it. Specifically, we propose to use deliberative focus groups to approximate the interactional contexts in which individuals process information and form beliefs in social life. Leveraging an experimental methodology, our design then varies the social makeup of deliberative groups, as well as the information about inequality we share with participants, to explore how different types of social environments and information shape people’s understandings of economic inequality. This should let us test, in particular, whether the low socioeconomic diversity of people’s discussion and interaction networks relates to their tendency to underestimate inequality, and whether beliefs about opportunity explain people’s lack of appetite for redistributive policies. In this exploratory article we motivate our methodological apparatus and describe its key features, before reflecting on the findings from a proof-of-concept study conducted in London in the fall of 2019.

Sibship and Inequality Beliefs: Do Siblings Have a Liberalizing or Conservatizing Effect?

“…Meanwhile, our assessment of meritocratic beliefs is necessarily restricted to a single measure which examines respondent's tendency to explain success through individual versus structural (or a mix of both) factors. In the context of rising economic inequality (Gornick and Jantti 2013;Piketty 2014), we argue that the research literature can benefit from a more comprehensive understanding of the determinants of such attitudes (Summers et al 2022).…”

“…On the other hand, nations with a "communist history" are more likely to be skeptical of large income differences (Hadler 2005;Kunovich and Słomczy nski 2007). Studies also reveal the interplay of more micro-macro processes and biographical aspects that may shape inequality beliefs (see Summers et al 2022). For example, using focus groups, Summers et al 2022 demonstrated that other participants' views routinely shaped their own views and participants' understandings were especially malleable around information considered unfamiliar.…”

“…It is possible to combine these ways of thinking to consider how siblings may shape inequality beliefs. Recognizing that individuals form beliefs about inequality through social interaction (Summers et al 2022), siblings may act as resources to one another for social interactions, and when there are fewer or no opportunities to turn to one another, they go elsewhere for those interactions.…”

“…In the context of rising economic inequality (Gornick and Jantti 2013; Piketty 2014), we argue that the research literature can benefit from a more comprehensive understanding of the determinants of such attitudes (Summers et al. 2022).…”

Why isn’t there More Support for Progressive Taxation of Wealth? A Sociological Contribution to the Wider Debate

“…distributional-thinking about the economy is not widely shared. Instead, as Summers et al [30] found, people tend to resort to 'heuristics' when asked to think about economic distributions, such as imagining social groups and their lifestyles. This is consistent with Savage's argument that the cultural dimensions of inequality cannot be reduced to an economic distributional grid (see e.g.…”