What Motivates Political Preferences? Self‐interest, Ideology, and Fairness in a Laboratory Democracy

Abstract

Substantial prior literature has established that subjects in laboratory experiments are typically willing to sacri…ce their own well-being to make …nancial allocations more equal among participants. We test the applicability of this result in an environment that contains some of the key contextual issues that are usually excluded from more abstract games but which might be important in situations involving income redistribution. Our general …nding is that votes for a redistributive tax are almost entirely in accordance with self-interest: above-average earners vote for low tax rates and below-average earners vote for high tax rates. A measure of subjects' preferences for fairness or equality, their self-reported economic ideology, is not directly related to their voting behavior in this experiment. Because the ideology measure should be correlated with any intrinsic preferences regarding inequality aversion, we conclude that any preferences for fairness or inequality that our subjects possess are not strong enough to overcome self-interest in this context. We do, however, …nd evidence for a possible indirect e¤ect of ideology on choice behavior in that more conservative subjects tend to be more responsive to their self-interest than the more liberal subjects.

Inequality aversion and voting on redistribution

“…For example, voting for inequality-reducing redistribution may be less common when incomes are earned and voters therefore feel entitled to their incomes (see Fong (2001) for survey evidence; Cappelen et al (2010) for dictator games with production; Esarey et al (2012) for voting on redistribution). The absence of such entitlements in our design may have induced voters to think of choosing a distribution rather than actually redistributing incomes with firm entitlements.…”

Equity and the willingness to pay for green electricity in Germany

“…Ample empirical evidence suggests that equity motives play a key role in many areas, such as international climate negotiations (Lange and Vogt, 2003;Kesternich et al, 2014;Vogt, 2016), as well as taxation (Esarey et al, 2012;Höchtl et al, 2012;Kallbekken et al, 2010). Another important field is the price setting of private goods (Kahneman et al, 1986), for which there is evidence that people are more likely to be willing to pay for a good when its price is perceived as fair, which crucially depends on whether other customers pay the same price or whether there is price discrimination.…”

Dependency Status and Demand for Social Insurance: Evidence from Experiments and Surveys

“…They find that gender differences are largely due to more left-leaning voting by single women, with no robust effect of divorce risk or labor force participation. Iversen and Rosenbluth (2010) provide the most articulated link between the household 3 Subjects have generally shown a willingness to vote in favor of redistribution to some degree, though in-group favoritism is commonly found (Chen and Li, 2009;Klor and Shayo, 2010) and contextual factors can matter (Esarey et al, 2011b). Additionally, higher inequality is tolerated more when income differences are viewed as resulting from difference in effort rather than simply good or bad luck (Almås et al, 2010;Bogach et al, 2013;Esarey et al, 2011a).…”