What Is and What Ought to Be Popular Beliefs About Distributive Justice in Thirteen Countries

Marshall, Gordon; Swift, Adam; Routh, David A.; Burgoyne, Carole

doi:10.1093/oxfordjournals.esr.a018270

Cited by 83 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…As noted earlier, the "income differences are too large" question combines Inequality, Public Opinion, and Redistribution 9 a positive assessment of the degree of inequality with a normative view about what level of inequality is fair or appropriate. Normative views on this issue tend to vary considerably across countries (Kelley and Evans 1993;Marshall et al 1999;Kelley and Zagorski 2005;Lübker 2006). Hence there is reason to be skeptical about whether or not similar changes in mean responses in, say, Sweden and the United States would indicate true similarity in the degree of change in the perceived level of inequality in the two countries.…”

Section: Which Variation?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Inequality, public opinion and redistribution

Kenworthy¹,

McCall²

2007

Socio-Economic Review

337

225

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. According to the "median-voter" hypothesis, greater inequality in the market distribution of earnings or income tends to produce greater generosity in redistributive policy. We outline the steps in the causal chain specified by the hypothesis and attempt to assess these steps empirically. Prior studies focusing on cross-country variation have found little support for the median-voter model. We examine over-time trends in eight nations during the 1980s and 1990s. Here too the median-voter hypothesis appears to have little utility. Terms of use: Documents inIncome inequality has two components: (1) "market" inequality and (2) government redistribution via taxes and transfers. In principle, the two can be combined in any of a variety of ways: low market inequality with high redistribution, low market inequality with low redistribution, high market inequality with moderate redistribution, and so on. Of particular interest in the study of inequality is what happens when market inequality is high or increases. Does government compensate with high redistribution in order to secure a relatively egalitarian distribution of posttax-posttransfer income? According to one influential theoretical approach, that is indeed what tends to happen. This approach is based on a median-voter model of the politics of redistribution. Its best-known exposition is by Allan Meltzer and Scott Richard (1981). A higher level of market inequality implies a greater distance between * Forthcoming in Socio-Economic Review. Kenworthy: Department of Sociology, University of Arizona, lane.kenworthy@arizona.edu. McCall: Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, l-mccall@northwestern.edu. We are grateful to the Russell Sage Foundation for financial support, to Julian Brash for research assistance, to Jonathan Kelley for generously sharing his calculations, and to Klaus Armingeon, Jessica Epstein, Lloyd Gruber, Julia Lynch, Jonas Pontusson, David Rueda, Stefan Svallfors, and two anonymous SER reviewers for comments on earlier drafts. Inequality, Public Opinion, and Redistribution2 mean and median (pretax-pretransfer) income, with the latter further below the former. The lower the median relative to the mean, the more the median income person or household is likely to benefit from government redistribution, in the sense that the transfers she receives will exceed her share of the tax burden. Hence the greater the amount of redistribution she will favor. More market inequality thus leads t...

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Section: Which Variation?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Inequality, public opinion and redistribution

Kenworthy¹,

McCall²

2007

Socio-Economic Review

337

225

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…4 Roemer (1993, p.149) 5 For more detailed evidence, see among others Marshall et al (1999), Corneo & Gruner (2002), Alesina & Glaeser (2004) and Alesina & Angeletos (2005). which emphasizes the role of luck in shaping individual success.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Equality of opportunity and luck: Definitions and testable conditions, with an application to income in France

Lefranc

Pistolesi

Trannoy

2009

Journal of Public Economics

224

238

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We offer a model of equality of opportunity that encompasses different conceptions expressed in the public and philosophical debates. In addition to circumstances whose effect on outcome should be compensated and effort which represents a legitimate source of inequality, we introduce a third factor, luck, that captures the random factors whose impact on outcome should be even-handed for equality of opportunity to be satisfied. Then, we analyse how the various definitions of equality of opportunity can be empirically identified, given data limitations and provide testable conditions. Definitions and conditions resort to standard stochastic dominance tools. Lastly, we develop an empirical analysis of equality of opportunity for income acquisition in France over the period 1979-2000 which reveals that the degree of inequality of opportunity tends to decrease and that the degree of risk of income distributions, conditional on social origin, appears very similar across all groups of social origins.JEL Codes: D63, J62, C14

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“…To date, we definitely lack empirical data to answer this question with certainty, but the idea of a biologically evolved sense of fairness is not made absurd by the existing data. As early as the age of 12 months, children react to inequity [59][60][61], equity has been identified in many cultures around the word [12,13], and children reject conventional rules when they violate principles of fairness [62]. We do not take experiments on inequity aversion in non-human primates as evidence for a biologically evolved sense of fairness, as the negative reactions to inequity observed so far can still be interpreted in more parsimonious ways (see [63] for a review and [64] for methodological issues).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Meritocratic distributions have been observed across many societies [12], including hunter-gatherer societies [13][14][15][16], and can be detected very early in human development [17,18], suggesting that equity could be a universal and innate pattern in human psychology.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the evolutionary origins of equity

Debove

Baumard

André

2016

Preprint

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Equity, defined as reward according to contribution, is considered a central aspect of human fairness in both philosophical debates and scientific research. Despite large amounts of research on the evolutionary origins of fairness, the evolutionary rationale behind equity is still unknown. Here, we investigate how equity can be understood in the context of the cooperative environment in which humans evolved. We model a population of individuals who cooperate to produce and divide a resource, and choose their cooperative partners based on how they are willing to divide the resource. Agent-based simulations, an analytical model, and extended simulations using neural networks provide converging evidence that equity is the best evolutionary strategy in such an environment: individuals maximize their fitness by dividing benefits in proportion to their own and their partners' relative contribution. The need to be chosen as a cooperative partner thus creates a selection pressure strong enough to explain the evolution of preferences for equity. We discuss the limitations of our model, the discrepancies between its predictions and empirical data, and how interindividual and intercultural variability fit within this framework.

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What Is and What Ought to Be Popular Beliefs About Distributive Justice in Thirteen Countries

Cited by 83 publications

References 16 publications

Inequality, public opinion and redistribution

Inequality, public opinion and redistribution

Equality of opportunity and luck: Definitions and testable conditions, with an application to income in France

On the evolutionary origins of equity

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