Do Income Fairness Perceptions Trump Perceptions of Income Disparities?

• In Event: Poster Session: Democracy and Autocracy (II) & Class and Inequality
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Inequality and Attitudes toward Redistribution

Abstract

The political, societal, and individual repercussions of economic inequality have been taken center stage in the social sciences and abound in empirical studies. Although an increasing amount of empirical evidence suggests that economic inequality is detrimental to social cohesion, quality of democracy and even economic performance, individual perceptions of income inequalities could, so far, not be firmly associated with political discontent or mobilization for more redistribution. This paper contends that this lack of association, combining the economic with the political sphere, might, in part, result from erroneously equating people’s perceptions of income differences with their evaluations thereof. Or, in other words, perceptions of income inequalities become politically meaningful once they are evaluated as unfair irrespective of actually perceived income disparities. To test this consequential hypothesis, this paper draws on the ISSP 2019 Social Inequality module which includes, for the first time, two measures of perceived income inequality which allow to differentiate between their corresponding cognitive and evaluative effects.

Encompassing nearly thirty countries worldwide, the second release of the ISSP 2019 Social Inequality survey allows for a multifaceted analytical approach. We will, first, investigate whether and to what extent our two individual-level measures of perceptions of income inequality are conditioned by objectively measured levels of income inequality or recent increases therein. In a second step, we will scrutinize, based on a defined set of indicators, commonalities and differences in the origins of the cognitive and evaluative bases of perceived inequality with a particular interest in the effects of regional levels of inequality and frequent contacts with poorer and richer people. The concluding analyses will focus on their social and political consequences with a particular focus on social trust and redistributive preferences as dependent variables.

The empirical evidence clearly underscores the societal and political implications of (un)fairness perceptions of income inequality and concomitantly lays bare the presumed shortcomings of perceived income disparities as an established ISSP measure of inequality.

Authors

• Sonja Zmerli, Sciences Po Grenoble UGA

• Michael William Webb, University of Florida