How Consistent Are Perceptions of Inequality? (original) (raw)
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Perceived Inequality and Policy Preferences
Center for Social Norms and Behavioral dynamics Working Papers, 2021
Economic inequality in the US has increased since the 1950s, yet this has not been accompanied by increased taxation and redistribution. The question how US Americans (mis-)perceive this inequality and to what extent this perception can translate into a demand for redistribution has therefore become an important policy question and a recent academic debate. We investigate how perceived income inequality causally a ects people's fairness views and their support for redistribution in a comprehensive and well-powered survey experiment with a representative sample of US Americans. We find precisely estimated null e ects. While US Americans underestimate the extend of poverty and, in particular, strongly overestimate the income of top earners, there is no evidence for a causal e ect of perceived inequality on political views or behavior. We test the role of a series of moderators and find that this null e ect holds for di erent income groups and party a liations, as well as for participants with di erent levels of trust in government and with di erent levels of perceived personal autonomy. Our study thus suggests that informing people about the extent of inequality in a society will not e ectively alter their support for redistributive policies.
Measuring perceptions of income inequality: Different ways, different results
The present study continues the line of research initiated by Amiel and Cowell which uses „questionnaire experiments” to elicit popular views on income inequality. Previous studies found that the perceptions often violate axioms of income inequality measurement and are self-contradictory. We suspect that this can be attributed to features of the original experiments rather than the way subjects perceive inequality. In order to test this hypothesis, we modify the original questionnaire by reordering, standardizing, and merging its items, to name just few changes, that we expected would make a difference. We test both questionnaires against each other on a randomly divided sample. We find that our changes often result in a decrease of puzzling and conflicting answers and in an increased support expressed for the axioms. However, the number of puzzling and conflicting answers is still significant and support for income inequality axioms remains weak.
Attitudes Toward Economic Inequality: The Illusory Agreement
Political Science Research and Methods, 2018
Recent studies of attitudes toward economic inequality suggest that most people around the world prefer very low levels of inequality, despite well-known trends toward greater inequality within many countries. Even within countries, people across the political spectrum are said to be in remarkable agreement about the ideal level of economic inequality. Using survey data from 40 countries and a novel survey experiment in the United States, we show that this apparent agreement is illusory. When relying on a widely used cross-national survey measure of Ideal Pay Ratios, preferred levels of inequality are heavily influenced by two well-documented sources of perceptual distortion: the anchoring effect and ratio bias. These effects are substantial and many times larger than the influence of fundamental political predispositions. As a result, these cross-national survey measures tapping preferences regarding economic inequality produce misleading conclusions about desired levels of inequal...
An Empirical Analysis of the Determinants of Perceived Inequality
Review of Income and Wealth, 2017
Perception of inequality is important for the analysis of individuals' decisions and for policy assessment. Despite the broad range of analytic gains that it grants, our knowledge about perception of inequality, its measurement and its causes is still limited since it is intrinsically unobservable, multidimensional and essentially contested. Using a novel econometric approach, we study how observable individual characteristics affect the joint distribution of a set of indicators of perceived inequality in a specific domain. Using data from the International Social Survey Programme (2009 wave), we offer a new tool to analyze the associations among these indicators and how they are affected by covariates.
Attitudes towards redistribution and the interplay between perceptions and beliefs about inequality
British Journal of Social Psychology, 2019
Although economic inequality has increased over the last few decades, support for redistributive policies is not widely accepted by the public. In this paper, we examine whether attitudes towards redistribution are a product of both perceptions of, and beliefs about, inequality. Specifically, we argue that the association between perceived inequality and support for redistribution varies by beliefs that justify inequality. We investigated this hypothesis in a cross-cultural/country sample (N = 56,021 from 41 countries) using two different operationalizations of support for redistribution and two distinct beliefs that justify inequality. As hypothesized, the perceived size of the income gap correlated positively with believing that it is the government's responsibility to reduce inequality among those who rejected beliefs that justify inequality, whereas there was no association for those who endorsed these beliefs. Similarly, perceived economic inequality correlated positively with support for progressive taxation, but this association was weaker among those who endorsed meritocratic and equal opportunity beliefs. Together, these results demonstrate that ideologies influence the relationship between perceived inequality and attitudes towards redistribution, and that support for redistribution varies by how the policy is framed.
Growing income inequality, growing legitimacy: a longitudinal approach to perceptions of inequality
2019
Scholars studying preferences for redistribution are puzzled. How can we explain the stable and relatively low support for redistributive policies while economic inequality has risen to unprecedented levels? To solve this puzzle, we ask three questions: Do we build our perception of inequalities based on objective inequalities? Do the perceived inequalities influence our willingness to accept larger inequalities? Are these discrepancies rising these last three decades? To do so we exploit the ISSP module on inequality and trace perceptions of inequality and fairness evaluation over time and in cross-national perspective. Our results suggest that there is no clear trend of rising distortions over time. On the contrary, perceptions of inequality rose sharply between 1999 and 2009, an observation which is especially true for top-end inequality. However, we find little evidence that individuals adjust their fairness evaluation in times of rising inequality. Our results indicate that the gap between perceived and fair inequality is a strong predictor for preferences for redistribution, but this its influence tends to decrease over time.
Inequality poses one of the biggest challenges of our time. It is not self-correcting in the sense that citizens demand more redistributive measures in light of rising inequality, which recent studies suggest may be due to the fact that citizens' perceptions of inequality diverge from objective levels. Moreover, it is not the latter, but the former, which are related to preferences conducive to redistribution. However, the nascent literature on inequality perceptions has, so far, not accounted for the role of subjective position in society. The paper advances the argument that the relationship between inequality perceptions and preferences towards redistribution is conditional on the subjective position of respondents. To that end, I analyze comprehensive survey data on inequality perceptions from the social inequality module of the International Social Survey Programme (1992, 1999, and 2009). Results show that inequality perceptions are associated with preferences conducive to redistribution particularly among those perceived to be at the top of the social ladder. Gaining a better understanding of inequality perceptions contributes to comprehending the absence self-correcting inequality.
Introducing the inequality and politics survey: preliminary findings
2020
Inequality and Politics is an online survey that was carried out in thirteen West European countries and the United States in 2019. The dataset includes representative samples of at least 2000 respondents per country. The survey probes citizens’ perceptions of economic and political inequalities and their attitudes towards “inequality-correcting policies.” This manuscript explains the theoretical motivations behind the survey, describes the dataset and presents some preliminary findings pertaining to five themes: perceptions of economic inequality, normative evaluations of inequality, explanations that respondents give for inequalities, perceptions of political inequality and redistributive policy preferences. Our findings shed new light on the political effects of economic inequality in a comparative perspective.
2018
Individuals with a higher social position are more tolerant of current income inequality than individuals with a lower social position. Besides this, attitudes towards income inequality are influenced by inequality-legitimising myths in a given society. Little is known about how these two factors interact. This study combines these two lines of research and argues that different social strata are more polarised in their attitudes towards inequality in societies with strong prevalent meritocratic perceptions. We expect lower-status individuals (i.e. with a lower income or education) to experience a threat to their group esteem and therefore be less likely to support their society’s inequalities in societies with such strong meritocratic perceptions. This hypothesis was tested using data from the International Social Survey Programme 2009 (Social Inequality) on 39 countries. The results show that different social strata are indeed more polarised in their attitudes towards inequality in societies where meritocratic perceptions are more prevalent. Our results are robust for income, but not for education. This suggests that in perceived meritocracies, people regard income as the primary indicator of effort and ability. Earlier draft version of Roex, K.L.A., Huijts, T. & Sieben, I. Attitudes towards income inequality ‘Winners’ versus ‘losers’ of the perceived meritocracy, Acta Sociologica (online pre-publication version, 1-17). Copyright © [2018] (SAGE Publications). Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications. DOI: 10.1177/0001699317748340
Are fairness perceptions shaped by income inequality? evidence from Latin America
The Journal of Economic Inequality
A common assumption in the literature is that the actual level of income inequality shapes individuals' beliefs about whether the income distribution is fair ("fairness views," for short). However, individuals do not directly observe income inequality (which often leads to large misperceptions), nor do they consider all inequities to be unfair. In this paper, we empirically assess the link between objective measures of income inequality and fairness views in a context of high but decreasing income inequality. To do this, we combine opinion poll data with harmonized data from household surveys of 18 Latin American countries from 1997-2015. We find a strong and statistically significant relationship between income inequality and unfairness views across countries and over time. Unfairness views evolved in the same direction as income inequality for 17 out of the 18 countries in our sample. We find that individuals who are older, unemployed, and left-wing are, on average, more likely to perceive the income distribution as very unfair. Finally, we find that fairness views and income inequality have predictive power for individuals' self-reported propensity to mobilize and protest independent of each other, suggesting that these two variables capture different channels through which changes in the income distribution can affect social unrest.