| Summary: | <p>When do people want redistribution? Income inequality has been on the rise in recent decades, especially in advanced democracies. Since redistribution is the main tool that governments have at their disposal to ameliorate income disparities, and government policies are (at least partly) influenced by public opinion, abating income inequality will largely depend on whether people want redistribution. Therefore, this has brought renewed importance to understanding the determinants of support for redistribution.</p>
<p>Redistributive preferences are commonly viewed as being driven by self-interest, implying that support for redistribution is monotonically determined by how much a person can expect to gain or lose from it. However, empirical evidence has not always been consistent with this framework, and findings have varied due to data availability as well as differences in methodology and the operationalisation of key variables.</p>
<p>This dissertation consists of three papers that make use of the World Values Survey and the European Values Study to analyse the determinants of respondents’ support for redistribution. The first paper focuses on the effects of inequality and development on public support for and division over redistribution. The results show that support is higher in countries that are rich and unequal, and division is lower in countries that are poor and equal. The second paper focuses on how people perceive the utility of redistribution in absolute or relative terms depending on whether they can expect to gain or lose from it. The results show that people below the mean income base their preferences on their absolute distance from the mean, whereas for people above the mean it is based on their relative distance from the mean. The third paper focuses on the role that political parties play in (de-)activating self-interest, using the Comparative Manifesto Project to measure party polarisation on economic issues. The results show that people, particularly the poor, are more self-interested when parties are more polarised in their economic positions.</p>
<p>Overall, the findings indicate that inequality drives support for redistribution more in rich countries because the poor have more to gain, and the rich are willing to pay more to ameliorate disparities. This suggests that public opinion in advanced democracies is unlikely to tolerate protracted rises in inequality.</p>
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