Who sees an hourglass? Assessing citizens’ perception of local economic inequality

Abstract

The scholarly literature is observing a slow but steady growth in research exploring the effects of subnational economic inequality on political attitudes and behavior. Germane to this work is the assumption that citizens are aware of the level of inequality in their local residential context. At present, however, the evidence in support of this assumption is mixed. This article attempts to offer the literature improved tests of citizens’ awareness of local inequality by addressing a key limitation in past work—the discordance between the geographic unit underlying measures of the independent and dependent variables. Analyzing two national surveys employing a measure of perceived inequality scaled to the local level, the results suggest that citizens are indeed aware of the level of income inequality in their local environment and that the link between objective and perceived local inequality is most pronounced among lower income citizens.

Local exposure to inequality among the poor increases support for taxing the rich

“…Because subjective socioeconomic status depends to a great extent on features of an individual's local context, studies conducted at relatively high levels of aggregation may mask important variation, and our evidence appears to support this idea (Velez and Wong, 2017). Most observational studies of local inequality use measures at relatively high levels of geographic aggregation, such as U.S. states (Franko, 2016(Franko, , 2017, counties (Newman et al, 2015;Cheung and Lucas, 2016;Solt et al, 2017;Newman et al, 2018), municipalities (Phillips, 2017;van Holm, 2019), or zip codes (Johnston and Newman, 2016;Page and Goldstein, 2016). One exception is Minkoff and Lyons (2017), who use smaller spatial aggregations, but only consider New York City.…”

“…Research in political science also suggests that people are aware of inequality in their local environment, and that these effects of these signals are likely conditional on SES (Brown-Iannuzzi et al, 2017), and may be especially pronounced for the poor (e.g. Kawachi and Kennedy, 1999;Newman et al, 2018). Relatedly, there is growing empirical evidence that local demographic context shapes political behaviors (Hopkins, 2010;Kasara, 2013;Robinson, 2017;de Kadt and Sands, 2019).…”

Inequality in Researchers’ Minds: Four Guiding Questions for Studying Subjective Perceptions of Economic Inequality

“…Thus, it is important that researchers consider what level of inequality they are interested in examining and operationalize their measures accordingly. This operationalization of the level of analysis, we argue, has important theoretical and empirical implications that researchers assessing perceptions of inequality need to consider (e.g., Ifcher, Zarghamee, & Graham, 2019;Newman, Shah, & Lauterbach, 2018;Xu & Garand, 2010).…”

Trust in Government and the American Public’s Responsiveness to Rising Inequality

“…Although people may be ignorant of annual trends in inequality (Bartels 2016), or be uncertain regarding the true level of inequality in the country or their place in the income distribution (Gimpelson and Treisman 2018), they are clearly aware that income inequality has increased over the past several decades. Furthermore, even if people are ignorant of the true level of inequality in the United States, it may be due to the fact that they pay greater attention to inequality in their state (Xu and Garand 2010) or local areas (Newman, Johnston, and Lown 2015; Newman, Shah, and Lauterbach 2018), rather than ignorance of inequality in and of itself. In short, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the American public is at least somewhat aware that inequality has risen.…”