Solidarity Behaviour and Age: The Identity-Solidarity Game in a Large Panel Survey of the German Resident Population

• In Event: The Politics of Aging

Abstract

What impact does age have on solidarity behaviour? Many redistribution flows between and within age groups have been institutionalised in extensive welfare states. Yet, the extent to which people genuinely desire redistribution across or within age groups remains largely unknown. The current knowledge base relating to willingness to give to others in the welfare state is almost entirely restricted to standardized survey research and lacks behavioural measures.
In this study, we use the innovative Identity-Solidarity Game, an expanded version of the Solidarity Game developed by Selten and Ockenfels (1998), in the second phase of a broad and representative online survey of German citizens. The Solidarity Game is a miniature model of the welfare system in which individuals can divide funds with two other participants who may be unlucky in groups of three. Participants are presented with participant information from wave 1, including age, income, descent, and party preference, and asked to make decisions in four separate scenarios. Each scenario involves receiving real information from other group member, anonymously, pertaining to one of the variables before deciding how the individual should split the sum available. We vary the group composition experimentally to test the causal effects of group homogeneity versus heterogeneity (giving more to people age-similar to me) or the age of other participants (older participants are seen as more deserving) on costly solidarity behavior. Subsequently, we compare the effects observed in the age scenario with those of income, descent, and political party preference scenarios. We anticipate that the effects of the age scenario will be the smallest amongst the four due to party preference and descent being more salient indicators of identity in Germany, while income acts as a signal of deservingness. The hypotheses are pre-registered, and the study funded by the ERC (https://bit.ly/politsolid ) has received pre-approval from the ethics review board.

Authors

• Achim Goerres, University of Duisburg-Essen

• Markus Stephan Tepe, University of Bremen

• Jakob Jonathan Kemper