Positional Deprivation and Support for Redistribution and Social Insurance

• In Event: Which Distributive Policies Resonate with Working Class Voters in Europe?

Abstract

This paper explores how support for social policy and economic redistribution is shaped by new measures of economic hardship that I call “positional deprivation.” The enormous literature on the role of economic position in shaping such support has tended to focus on individual-level and aggregate-level economic factors like poverty, inequality or unemployment that capture either dynamic (over-time) OR positional (between-group) misfortune, not both. This arguably misses the distinct combination of dynamic and positional misfortunes that arguably plays a distinct and strong role in fostering economic insecurities and demands to redress such insecurities. Positional deprivation more directly captures this combination of dynamic and positional misfortune, by measuring the growth in disposable household income across a country’s income deciles and calculating a given decile’s gains relative to those of other deciles. The paper hypothesizes that support for social democratic redistribution and for both redistribution and social insurance is stronger among individuals facing higher “positional deprivation,” those in deciles whose gains are smaller than the gains of the average, richest or poorest deciles in their own country. Analysis of European Social Survey (ESS) data on individual-level support for redistribution and social policy provisions in 20 European countries, between 2002 and 2014, supports these claims. Net of familiar political and economic drivers, positional deprivation appears to be important to how economic experience shapes welfare state politics.

Author

• Brian Burgoon, University of Amsterdam