Inequality, Fairness and Policy Attitudes

• In Event: Information, Media and Policy Attitudes in a Populist Age

Abstract

This paper employs survey experimental methods to examine distinctive mechanisms through which rising economic inequality may shape policy attitudes. The steep rise in income and wealth inequality in the U.S. and other established democracies has spurred a vast, multidisciplinary research literature. Within political science, a primary analytical focus has been the political sources of inequality – a research problem usefully framed by the “puzzle” of vastly unequal economic outcomes under conditions of (nominal) political equality. The political *effects* of inequality have, however, received somewhat less attention, particularly with respect to political attitudes and behavior. The most striking empirical pattern may be the apparent non-effect of increasing inequality on popular demands for redistribution, in contradiction of standard economic models of public spending (e.g., Meltzer and Richard, 1981). Experimental studies of the effects of inequality-related information on redistributive attitudes sketch, on the whole, a broadly similar picture of limited public responsiveness to economic inequality (Trump, 2017; Kuziemko, et al., 2015), although there is some evidence that mass tolerance for unequal outcomes may be conditional (Pellicer, Piraino, and Wegner, 2017).

In this paper, we depart from the extant literature in two ways. First, we consider an indirect pathway along which inequality-information may influence policy attitudes. We start from the premise that perceptions of inequality shape citizen judgments regarding the fairness of the system of policies bearing on the distribution of income and wealth. We further posit that citizens’ willingness to accept new policy initiatives is conditional on those arrangements’ perceived fairness. Observing a highly unequal income distribution should inform citizens’ assessments of the relative “ability to pay” of different income groups, in particular highlighting the far greater financial wherewithal of the rich as compared to the non-rich. Such assessments should in turn shape judgments about the fairness of proposals for new policies that involve taxation and spending.

Our second contrast with the existing literature is that, building on the previous research of two of the co-authors (Jacobs and Matthews, 2012, 2017), we consider the implications of this theoretical logic for non-redistributive policies, such as public-goods provision, whereas previous research has focused on responses to redistributive policies. We hypothesize that fairness judgments will influence non-rich citizens’ willingness to accept policies that impose broad tax increases in order to pay for broadly shared and valued goods (e.g., a gas tax to fund infrastructure improvements). To the degree that non-rich citizens know and attend to the resource differentials between themselves and their rich compatriots, such information makes alternative cost-distributions – those that would impose greater burdens on the rich – easier to call to mind, more politically feasible, and normatively more appealing. The greater salience and plausibility of fairer alternative distributions of burdens will, in turn, make non-rich citizens more likely to reject costly public investments as unfair in their financial burdens, even when they (the non-rich) would realize net benefits from the investment. Put differently, consistent with observed ultimatum-game behavior (Thaler, 1988), greater inequality makes it easier for non-rich citizens to imagine financing arrangements under which the more affluent pay a greater share and, thus, to reject any proposed financing arrangement as insufficiently progressive.

We test these arguments in online survey experiments with large, representative samples of adult U.S. residents. The basic design combines the presentation of information about the nature of, and over-time change in, the distribution of income and wealth in the United States, with measures of support for a range of costly public-goods policies. In a factorial setup, we cross a manipulation of inequality information with a manipulation of information about the distribution of public-investment costs to examine how inequality information conditions the degree of progressivity that respondents demand of public-investment financing.

In summary, this paper adds to existing scholarship on public responses to inequality by investigating empirically a novel theoretical framework that connects inequality and policy attitudes through perceptions of the fairness of the policy and political context. In addition to its implications for understanding the political effects of inequality, the research will also yield original insights relevant to scholars of public opinion.

Authors

• Timothy Hicks, University College London

• Alan M. Jacobs, University of British Columbia

• Scott Matthews, Memorial University