How Competing Fairness Primes Shape Preferences to Address Inequality

• In Event: Information and Political Engagement

Abstract

Widening income inequality in America has not been met with a proportional increase in support for redistribution (Ashock et al, 2015). A variety of theories have been given to explain American voters’ resistance toward redistributive policies. Alesina et al. (2001) put forward a race-based explanation for America’s lack of redistribution, asserting that “America’s troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state”. Cramer (2012) offers a place-based model to explain the lack of support for redistribution in the United States. She argues that rural Americans, imbibed with “rural
consciousness”, prefer limited government due to a collective belief that the government is not working for them. Other common theories proposed are American Dream ideology and system justification theory (McCall et al., 2017).

An emerging literature seeks to understand how providing information about inequality affects Americans’ support for policies that seek to address inequality (Cruces et al., 2013; Kuziemko et al, 2015; Lendway, 2021). One recent theory for how information about inequality can affect policy preferences is McCall et al.’s (2017) opportunity model, which theorizes that providing information about inequality leads individuals to think there are structural barriers to socioeconomic advancement and thus increases support for policies to address inequality. Their study demonstrates that information about the trend of rising inequality increases the perceived importance of structural factors relative to individual factors for socioeconomic advancement, leading to an increase in support for governmental and company policies to address pay inequality.

Less explored is how providing information about the reasons for pay inequality affects policy preferences. In the real world, people are presented with conflicting arguments about whether outcomes in society are fair or unfair. Therefore, it is important to understand how this dynamic affects policy preferences. This paper addresses that gap by showing that providing a statistic on pay inequality (priming structural unfairness) followed by showing the job descriptions of positions at different sides of the income distribution (priming structural fairness) causes a statistically significant decrease in support for governmental and business policies to address pay inequality. Furthermore, this paper identifies that one of the key mechanisms through which this effect operates is through increasing the belief that differences in pay are justified.



References

Alesina, Alberto, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote. 2001. "Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?” Brookings Paper on Economic Activity.

Ashok, Vivekinan, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Ebonya Washington. 2015. "Support for Redistribution in an Age of Rising Inequality: New Stylized Facts and Some Tentative Explanations". Brookings Paper on Economics Activity.

Cramer, Katherine. 2012. "Putting Inequality in its Place". American Political Science Review 106(3), 517-532.

Cruces, Guillermo, Ricardo Perez-Truglia, and Martin Tetaz. 2013. "Biased Perceptions of Income Distribution and Preferences for Redistribution: Evidence from a Survey Experiment”. Journal of Public Economics 98: 100-112.

Kuziemko, Ilyana, Michael Norton, Emanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva. 2015. "How Elastic are Preferences Toward Redistribution?" American Economic Review 105 (4), 1478-1508.

Lendway, Paul. 2021. "The Effect of Informational and Empathy-Enhancing Interventions on Redistributive Preferences". Yale Journal of International Affairs. Forthcoming.

McCall, Leslie, Derek Burk, Marie Laperriere, and Jennifer Richeson. 2017. Exposure to Rising Inequality Shapes Americans’ Opportunity Beliefs and Policy Support. PNAS 114 (36), 9593-9598.

Authors

• Paul Lendway, Yale University

• Gregory Huber, Yale University