Cost of Living Crisis: Relative Deprivation and Public’s Willingness to Give

• In Event: Public Opinion towards Aid, Poverty, and Development

Abstract

The pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis that has followed suit have changed the global giving behaviour. Donations in Germany, for example, has fallen from 23% of the public having donated to a global charity in the past 12 months in January 2020 at the start of the pandemic to 16% in September 2022; similar trends are seen in France and the UK (Development Engagement Lab 2022). What explains the change in the public’s charitable behaviours? The literature has examined the role of temporal relative deprivation and egoistic (interpersonal) relative deprivation (RD) in individuals’ giving behaviours. However, these two types of RD have been looked at separately behaviours (Pak and Babiarz 2022; Pettigrew 2015; Webber 2007). The rapidly changing economic situations warrant a joint consideration of both the public’s perception of their RD over time and against others. Using nationally representative sample from Germany, France, the UK, and the US, sample size of around 6,000 in each country, I design a survey experiment (split sample) where groups of respondents are primed to think about (1) their RD from 2019 to 2022, (2) their RD and their community’s RD, and (3) their RD and people in poor country’s RD. They are then asked to allocate $/£/€1000 to themselves, their community, and people in a poor country. The results show heterogenous effect of temporal and interpersonal relative deprivation; across the four countries, the donor public tend to allocate more to themselves when they have gotten worse, regardless of others’ situation. When they have gotten better from 2019 to 2022, they show more pro-giving behaviours to their community and poor countries. The paper contributes to the literature conceptually and empirically with its novel experiment to understand the joint effect of temporal and interpersonal RD on the public’s giving behaviour in four major donor countries.

Author

• Soo Min Oh, University of Birmingham