Exposure to Inequality in Highly Unequal Societies: Evidence from South Africa

• In Event: How Spatial Context and Institutions Affect Behavior and Distributive Outcomes

Abstract

Reminders of real-world economic inequality exist throughout the world, and in the most highly unequal societies they are ubiquitous. We conceptualize this as “exposure to inequality”: localized micro-environments of inequality that people experience directly every day, rather than the “global inequalities" that have occupied current research. How does such exposure to inequality shape political behavior? To answer this question we leverage both observational data from South Africa -- the world’s most unequal country -- that is unique in its quality and resolution, and an original field experiment conducted in Soweto. Observationally, we test whether neighborhood-level measures of inequality predict self-assessed socio-economic status, beliefs about inequality, and policy preferences over redistribution, using tens of thousands of geo-referenced survey respondents. Experimentally, we test whether randomly induced micro-environments of inequality, operationalized as the presence of a high status car in a low socio-economic neighborhood, cause changes in the willingness of people to sign a petition in favor of a redistributive “wealth tax.”

Authors

• Melissa Sands, University of California, Merced

• Daniel de Kadt, UC Merced