Income Inequality, Equal Opportunity, and Attitudes About Redistribution*

Abstract

Objective This article explores how income inequality and social mobility affect attitudes about redistribution in global perspective. Methods Individual‐level data on over 50,000 individuals from 38 countries in the International Social Survey Programme are combined with country‐level data from the World Bank, Standardized Income Inequality Database, and the Economic Freedom of the World data. OLS regression models with robust, clustered standard errors are estimated to account for the presence of unobserved, country‐level effects in the error terms. Results Social mobility is found to be a more important predictor of preferences for redistribution than income inequality. Specifically, those who live in countries with greater social mobility are more supportive of redistribution while individuals who have experienced upward mobility themselves are less supportive, although an upwardly mobile individual in a more mobile society is more supportive of redistribution than an upwardly mobile individual in a less mobile society. Conclusions The central finding of this study is that the tangibility of redistributive social policies may bolster support for social spending. The structures and institutions that facilitate upward mobility—and potentially attenuate some of the detrimental effects of income inequality—are generally the products of more comprehensive redistribution policies, and public opinion may reflect this.

Deserving a Just Pension: A Factorial Survey Approach*

“…Rather, our interpretation is related to positive policy feedbacks, as it seems that the rules of a system, which was not based on massive preferences (as it was imposed during a dictatorship) seems to be mirrored by subjective distributive rules despite the claim for larger pensions’ amounts. Therefore, the implementation of such private pension policies for more than 30 years could have certainly impacted in terms of inequality as well as individual preferences (Steele, ) and in more general terms the moral economy of the society (Mau, ; Svallfors, ; Sachweh, ). Nevertheless, to advance further in this direction would require different methodological strategies such as qualitative studies, which is part of the research agenda that follows from this study.…”

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

“…From a different angle, another strong thread in the fabric of the institutional theory of social policy and public opinion is a kind of population ecology perspective positing that, intentionally or unintentionally, welfare state policies and institutions create social and economic niches which are differently accessible according to people's location in the social structure, so that policies shape the cost and benefit of the welfare state differently by niche and that rational choice based on niche opportunities differentiates attitudes towards the welfare state [20,[39][40][41][42][43]. Note that this shares with materialism the view that social position/niche may produce different levels of costs and benefits and these operate through rational choice processes to differentiate atomistic economically self-interested attitudes, but it differs from the materialist perspective in locating the niche-creating mechanisms in the institutions of the welfare state rather than in technology and the organization of work.…”

Positive Returns and Equilibrium: Simultaneous Feedback Between Public Opinion and Social Policy

“…The slope of public responsiveness ( ) is always negative because the public want spending ( ) to move toward their more stable absolute preferences ( ) (see also Roosma, van Oorschot, & Gelissen, ; Steele, , for alternative approaches to relative and absolute preferences). Meanwhile, the slope of policy representation ( ) is positive because it follows what the public wants.…”