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How Elastic Are Preferences for Redistribution? Evidence from Randomized Survey Experiments †
Abstract
This paper analyzes the effects of information about inequality and taxes on preferences for redistribution using randomized online surveys on Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk). About 5,000 respondents were randomized into treatments providing interactive information on U.S. income inequality, the link between top income tax rates and economic growth, and the estate tax. We find that the informational treatment has very large effects on whether respondents view inequality as an important problem. By contrast, we find quantitatively small effects of the treatment on views about policy and redistribution: support for taxing the rich increases slightly, support for transfers to the poor does not, especially among those with lower incomes and education. An exception is the estate tax — we find that informing respondents that it affects only the very richest families has an extremely large positive effect on estate tax support, even increasing respondents' willingness to write to their U.S. senator about the issue. We also find that the treatment substantially decreases trust in government, potentially mitigating respondents' willingness to translate concerns about inequality into government action. Methodologically, we explore different strategies to lower attrition in online survey platforms and show our main results are robust across methods. A small follow-up survey one month later reveals that our results persist over time. Finally, we compare mTurk with other survey vendors and provide suggestions to future researchers considering this platform.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
... We offer new evidence on the public good(s) that broadly represent people's common interests, which could be key to building state capacity, especially the capacity to raise taxes (Besley & Persson, 2009). Our work also contributes to the literature on perceptions of inequality and preferences for redistribution (Alesina et al., 2018;Bartels, 2008;Bublitz, 2022;Campos-Vazquez et al., 2022;Gimpelson & Treisman, 2018;Kuhn, 2019;and Kuziemko et al., 2015) by investigating how heterogeneous perceptions of inequality and other types of perceptions across the population shape support for taxation and progressivity. ...
... Importantly, Berens and Gelepithis (2019) show that individuals may consider the distribution of benefits when forming preferences about who should bear the burden of paying for them. Our findings could also be showing that people are failing to connect fiscal policy with their concerns about inequality (see, e.g., Bartels, 2005;Kuziemko et al., 2015; and references therein), or that they prefer other unconventional policies and channels designed to redress economic inequality (as in McCall et al., 2017). Figure 5 includes results by age (Panels A and B) and sex (Panels C and D). ...
... Bartels (2005) finds that ordinary people in the U.S. support massive tax breaks for the rich in an era of accelerating economic inequality. Kuziemko et al. (2015) find that their primary informational treatment increases the preferred top 1% average tax rate by only 0.93 pp, a result that is significant at the 10% level. Ballard-Rosa et al. (2016) show that opinions on policy are generally progressive, but that preferences do not vary substantially from current tax policy, and support for taxing the rich is highly inelastic. ...
A key concern in high-inequality countries is whether greater tax revenue and progressivity could help to decrease inequality. Studies have shown that while people care about inequality, providing them with information about current levels of inequality or about specific policies has little impact on their preferences for redistribution. These preferences have usually been proxied by their preferences for government spending without any reference to taxation. In this study in Mexico, we take a novel approach by carrying out a randomized intervention in which we provide information related to (i) corruption, (ii) public health, or (iii) public safety. We then ask individuals about their willingness to pay higher taxes, and we ascertain their support for tax progressivity by asking about their preferred tax rates for the rich, the middle-income, and the poor. We find that willingness to pay higher taxes is affected only by the information on corruption and public health (2.56 and 2.89% points in additional taxes, respectively). We find that this information does not increase their preference for tax progressivity.
... A growing body of literature has shown that individuals across countries have biased beliefs about the shape of their country's income distribution and their position in it (Cruces et al., 2013;Kuziemko et al., 2015;Engelhardt and Wagener, 2018;Gimpelson and Treisman, 2018;Hoy and Mager, 2021;Bublitz, 2022;Gassmann and Timár, 2024). Biased beliefs can affect individuals' preferences for redistribution. ...
... First, we use two literature-based survey items to separately capture aversion to wealth inequality and support for wealth redistribution. Although these preferences are likely related (for income inequality see, e.g., Choi, 2021;Hoy and Mager, 2021), research suggests that the relationship between inequality aversion and support for redistribution may not be linear (Kuziemko et al., 2015). In the international sample of Hoy and Mager (2021, p. 316), 11% to 23% of participants across countries indicate that they think income inequality is too high, but that they do not see it as the role of the government to reduce it. ...
... In the international sample of Hoy and Mager (2021, p. 316), 11% to 23% of participants across countries indicate that they think income inequality is too high, but that they do not see it as the role of the government to reduce it. Kuziemko et al. (2015) suggest that low trust in the government may explain the divergence between inequality aversion and support for redistribution for some individuals again referring to income. While the literature has focused primarily on income in these survey questions, we believe it is also reasonable to differentiate between inequality aversion and support for redistribution in the context of wealth. ...
We study beliefs about wealth inequality and preferences for wealth redistribution. For this, we conduct a large-scale online survey in Germany. First, we analyze how well participants are informed about the German wealth distribution and their position in it. Second, we investigate how preferences for wealth redistribution are affected by an information experiment. One treatment group receives information about the shape of the German wealth distribution, while another treatment group receives information about their position in this distribution. Using a multidimensional approach to measure preferences for wealth redistribution, we find no significant average treatment effect for either treatment in the full sample, although those who overestimate their position reduce their aversion to inequality after learning their position, while those who underestimate their position are more likely to agree that anyone can become successful through hard work. We employ a data-driven approach to further investigate heterogeneity in treatment effects and present evidence that younger participants decrease their support for redistribution after learning about the shape of the wealth distribution. In contrast, older participants decrease their support after learning their position in the distribution. JEL-Codes: C900, D310, D630, D830.
... Effective transportation infrastructure can enhance economic development by facilitating the movement of goods and services, connecting businesses and markets, and supporting trade (Kuziemko et al., 2018). It can also create jobs, increase productivity, and promote economic growth (Ozawa, 2016). ...
... Effective transportation infrastructure can improve access to essential services such as healthcare, education, and social services by providing better mobility options to people in remote or underserved areas (Kuziemko et al., 2018). ...
... Effective transportation infrastructure can promote regional integration by linking neighboring countries and regions, facilitating the movement of goods and people, and promoting economic cooperation (Kuziemko et al., 2018). ...
Transportation infrastructure plays a crucial role in the economic development and growth of nations, facilitating trade and investment opportunities by enabling the movement of people, services, and goods across markets and regions. However, developing countries such as Sierra Leone face significant challenges in providing suitable transportation infrastructure to support logistics management. Inadequate upkeep, financial constraints, and limited access to technology hinder the development of transportation infrastructure in Sierra Leone. Consequently, logistics management, which involves the planning, implementation, and control of the movement of goods and services, is adversely affected, leading to delayed deliveries, increased costs, and decreased competitiveness in the global market. This study aims to analyze the state of transportation infrastructure in Sierra Leone and its impact on local commodities. To assess the impact of transportation infrastructure on local commodity supply in Sierra Leone, a qualitative approach was employed. The findings from the study reveal that poor transportation infrastructure particularly limited cold storage facilities along transportation routes can lead to the spoilage of perishable goods such as fruits and vegetables. The findings were supported by four important recommendations: investment in road maintenance and expansion, modernisation of port facilities, development of intermodal transportation hubs, and the promotion of public-private partnerships.
... Whether through priming (Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007), learning (Lenz, 2009), or framing effects (Lecheler & De Vreese, 2019), generations of studies of media coverage suggest that exposure to media stories should trigger at least short-term effects on attitudes. Yet the preponderance of social science research, across various country contexts, has found that providing people with information on inequality does not easily shift redistributive preferences (Alesina et al., 2018;Kuziemko et al., 2015;Trump, 2018;cf. Chow & Galak, 2012). ...
... The weight of political economy scholarship suggests that support for redistribution does not easily change (Stantcheva, 2021). Among the studies reaching this conclusion, Kuziemko et al. (2015) exposed participants to information about the unequal income distribution in the United States, eliciting little effect on support for redistributive policies. In a similar vein, Alesina et al. (2018) ran survey experiments in multiple countries emphasizing how poor children are likely to remain stuck in poverty, while children from wealthy families are likely to maintain their wealth. ...
... To further bolster confidence in our mediation results, we rerun the analysis in Online Appendix H using an alternative causal IVanalytical framework, which uses instrumental variables regression to examine the effects of mediators on outcomes. (Bullock & Green, 2021;Kuziemko et al., 2015;Peyton, 2020). These alternative mediation results mirror the results presented here, with a significant mediation effect emerging in the non-US bloc, but not in the US. ...
Do narratives about the causes of inequality influence support for redistribution? Scholarship suggests that information about levels of inequality does not easily shift redistributive attitudes. We embed information about inequality within a commentary article depicting the economy as being rigged to advantage elites, a common populist narrative of both the left and right. Drawing on the media effects and political economy literature, we expect articles employing narratives that portray inequality as the consequence of systemic unfairness to increase demands for redistribution. We test this proposition via an online survey experiment with 7426 respondents in Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our narrative treatment significantly increases attitudes favoring redistribution in five of the countries. In the US the treatment has no effect. We consider several reasons for the non-result in the US – highlighting beliefs about government inefficiency – and conclude by discussing general implications of our findings.
... The exception is , who show that providing left-wing respondents with accurate information about upward mobility, which is pessimistic relative to the baseline beliefs of the large majority, increases their support for "equality of opportunity" policies in the United States and Western Europe. In contrast, the seminal study by Kuziemko et al. (2015) in the United States shows that providing detailed information about the level of national inequality does not affect people's preferences for redistribution regardless of whether they state they are a Democrat or a Republican. The limited effect from information about inequality or mobility in other randomized survey experiments may be because they only provided information about one of these aspects. ...
... Secondly, a potential risk in a survey experiment is that results are skewed due to "experimenter demand effects" or "social desirability bias" (Kuziemko et al. 2015), whereby respondents provide either answers they think the experimenter would want to hear or answers they perceive as more socially acceptable. In our study this could look like respondents pretending to be more altruistic (measured as being concerned about inequality in their country) than they actually are. ...
... Existing studies on this topic (e.g. Kuziemko et al. 2015;) have illustrated that these issues are not very prevalent in randomized survey experiments about preferences for redistribution, by taking steps such as conducting follow-up surveys to a small 12 subset of respondents one week after the original survey. They have consistently found that experimenter demand effects are not present. ...
Are differences in preferences for redistribution between right- and left-wing voters amplified because of misperceptions of inequality? To address this question, we conduct three nationally representative, randomized survey experiments with 7020 Australians, in which respondents are informed about either the level of national inequality and economic mobility, their position in the national income distribution, or given no information. We show that correcting misperceptions of inequality reduces the gap in support for redistribution between right-wing and left-wing voters by between 21 to 37 percent. This is predominantly due to right-wing voters, who held more inaccurate priors, increasing their support for redistribution.
... Although we do not have the necessary measures to further explore this finding in this paper, we see several plausible explanations for why objectively exposed workers may perceive automation as unfair, while at the same time withholding support from candidates who seek to protect them against automation and AI's effects. First, studies of income inequality suggest that citizens may express concern about the fairness of rising inequality without seeking concomitant policy responses if they do not trust the government to effectively enact and implement such responses (Kuziemko et al., 2015;Macdonald, 2020). The same may be true of automation and AI-related protections. ...
... The same may be true of automation and AI-related protections. Alternatively, Kuziemko et al. (2015) and Bartels (2005) also show that publics concerned about inequality often fail to connect their concerns to actual policy responses. A third possibility relates to the design of our experiment, in which the candidate makes only vague promises to protect workers' jobs against exposure to market changes, automation and AI, or offshoring, providing little information about the nature or intensity of the policy response. ...
Technological change has dramatically reshaped labor markets, but technology’s distributional implications have been less politicized than those of other economic shocks. As innovation in automation and artificial intelligence accelerates, however, political parties face growing incentives to “claim” the issue. Candidates proposing to protect workers against technological change may appeal directly to workers’ economic concerns, but if technology is perceived similarly to other economic shocks, workers may also be mobilized through populist and ethno-nationalist appeals. This paper asks: relative to other shocks, what kind of messaging around workplace technological change resonates most with workers? We examine this question using a ten-country 3 ×\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\times$$\end{document} 3 survey experiment that randomly exposes each respondent to one of three vignettes featuring excerpts from political candidates’ speeches: the passages promise to protect workers against offshoring, automation and AI, or changing consumer demand and do so using populist rhetoric, populist and ethno-nationalist rhetoric, or no additional messaging. We find that overall support for protecting workers against technology is lower than for other shocks, but that all types of candidate messaging appeal to workers who feel vulnerable to technology.
... Typical applications include beliefs about inequality and preferences for redistribution (Cruces et al. 2013;Kuziemko et al. 2015;Alesina et al. 2018;Hoy and Mager 2021;Casarico et al. 2023) and beliefs about immigration statistics and attitudes towards migration (Grigorieff et al. 2020;Haaland and Roth 2020;Dylong and Uebelmesser 2024;Alesina et al. 2023). All these studies have in common that they elicit respondents' beliefs and then provide one or several pieces of information to the treatment group(s) in order to study the effect of the treatment on the outcome of interest for the treated group compared to the control group. ...
... Laypeople's expectations are most commonly studied in the context of inflation (see, e.g., Armantier et al. 2016;D'Acunto et al. 2021;Coibion et al. 2023), but have also become the focus 3 To measure belief updating, some studies elicit posterior beliefs at the end of the initial survey and/or conduct follow-up surveys a few weeks after the initial survey (Kuziemko et al. 2015;Alesina et al. 2018;Grigorieff et al. 2020;Haaland and Roth 2020;Angelici et al. 2022;Alesina et al. 2023). ...
Demographic change is one of Germany's most pressing social and economic challenges. Using data from a representative telephone survey, we analyze how well informed respondents are about the magnitude of demographic change and what factors influence the accuracy of their beliefs. We find that respondents tend to overestimate the old-age dependency ratio when considering the current and long-term demographic situation separately. However, their beliefs regarding the change of the old-age dependency ratios over the considered period are not far from the projected change. A better understanding of the German statutory pension insurance plays an important role for more accurate beliefs. JEL classification: H55, D83
... Nevertheless, the link between economic inequality (objective or perceived) and attitudes towards it is controversial. Although some research has shown that higher economic inequality relates to higher preferences for redistribution (e.g., Schmidt-Catran, 2016), other research suggests these variables do not relate (García-Sánchez et al., 2019;Kuziemko et al., 2018;Mijs, 2021). Indeed, objective levels of economic inequality predict attitudes towards economic inequality, which actually depends on people's awareness of those economic disparities. ...
... Focusing on the United Kingdom in the 1983-2004 period, Georgiadis and Manning (2012) also did not find an association between income inequality and redistribution. However, note that low trust in the government might explain the lack of association between economic inequality and preferences for redistribution (Kuziemko et al., 2018). Recently, using several rounds of the International Social Survey Program for a 25-year period, Mijs (2021) showed a negative relationship between objective income inequality and people's concerns about inequality, that is, negative attitudes towards inequality. ...
Attitudes towards economic inequality are crucial to uphold structural economic inequality in democratic societies. Previous research has shown that socioeconomic status, political ideology, and the objective level of economic inequality associated with individuals' attitudes towards economic inequality. However, some have suggested that people are aware of the individual and social features that are more functional according to the level of economic inequality. Therefore, individual predispositions such as cultural values could also predict these attitudes. In the current research, we expand previous results testing whether cultural variables at the individual level predict attitudes towards economic inequality. After analysing survey data including samples from 52 countries (N = 89,565), we found that self-enhancement values predict positively, and self-transcendence negatively, attitudes towards economic inequality as the ideal economic inequality measures. This result remained significant even after controlling by socioeconomic status, political ideology, and objective economic inequality. However, this effect is only true in high and middle social mobility countries, but not in countries with low social mobility. The present research highlights how cultural values and country social mobility are crucial factors to addressing attitudes towards economic inequality.
... Redistributive policies are recognized as one of the most effective routes for reducing economic inequality (Alvaredo et al., 2018;Piketty, 2015) and its aversive personal, interpersonal, and societal consequences (Sánchez-Rodríguez et al., 2019;Willis et al., 2022). However, although higher levels of economic inequality are associated with greater support for government intervention (Evans & Kelley, 2018;Schmidt-Catran, 2016), people often fail to support redistribution strategies (e.g., Kuziemko et al., 2015;Lupu & Pontusson, 2011). A crucial issue is, therefore, to identify the factors driving the support for redistribution in society. ...
Economic inequality is a significant problem of modern society, and redistributive policies are one of the most effective tools for reducing it. Previous studies have highlighted the importance of social mobility to understand attitudes toward redistribution. Across three preregistered studies (N = 2475; one cross-sectional and two experimental) in different countries (Italy and Spain), we investigated the relationship between upward and downward societal mobility beliefs and attitudes toward redistribution, as well as potential explanatory mechanisms. Results showed that when people believe that it is easy to improve the socioeconomic status in their society, they oppose redistributive policies; conversely, when people believe that is difficult, they support redistributive policies. Importantly, meritocratic beliefs explained the upward mobility effect on redistribution, and perceived personal economic risks accounted for the downward mobility effect. Implications of these results for the design of policies to reduce economic inequality are discussed.
... Our results suggest that simply providing information about current levels of economic inequality is not necessarily associated with changes in redistributive preferences. Experiments with representative samples and accounting for longstanding treatment effects have shown that informing about current levels of economic inequality can motivate preferences for redistribution, but these effects can be either small or depend on the context (Becker, 2020;Kuziemko et al., 2015;Mijs & Hoy, 2022). Thus, our findings add to this literature by accounting for underlying cognitive processes (or "cognitive middleman"; Mijs & Hoy, 2022) linking economic inequality information with attitudes toward redistribution. ...
Perceived economic inequality is positively associated with public support for policies to reduce it. However, providing information about economic inequality does not necessarily motivate people to support redistributive policies. This inconsistency may be due to how people interpret the information about inequality. We argue that the interpretation of information about inequality differs between individuals as a function of the characteristics of the source and people’s ideologies. We conducted two experiments using an exploratory (N = 239) and confirmatory (N = 707) strategy. We found that attitudes toward redistribution increased when a seemingly neutral international institution (as opposed to a left-wing political party) provided information about economic inequality due to the credibility attributed to the source—but not due to power and familiarity. Moreover, the effect of providing information about inequality on support for redistribution (via source credibility) depended on people’s ideologies: it was positive and statistically significant for people who held more (vs. less) system-justifying beliefs. These findings contribute to understanding the interplay between social psychological processes, communication strategies, and attitudes toward redistribution.
... Some accounts point to 'equal treatment' (Scheve and Stasavage 2022), but countervailing evidence points to fairness as the 'ability to pay' (Daunton 2002), inherently requiring unequal treatment. Similarly, misperceptions of how taxes actually work can lead to slippage from what voters might think is fair under full information (Kuziemko et al. 2015). This makes it difficult to hypothesize in advance which taxes should elicit greater support on fairness grounds. ...
How governments raise tax revenue is at the core of domestic political conflict. Public opinion towards taxation is measured generally and qualitatively by many surveys, but previous research has not closely linked public preferences to the budget problem faced by governments regarding how best to raise or cut a marginal quantity of revenue. We present results from a novel tax preference experiment in which UK respondents are given choices over different tax ‘levers’ that are expected to raise or cut equal revenue. We find that while different tax levers vary substantially in their popularity, there is a ‘hidden consensus’ regarding different tax levers across income levels and partisanship of the respondents.
... Moreover, recent studies (e.g. Kuziemko et al. 2015) on the relationship between citizens' preferences for redistributive policy and their knowledge of relative personal income also adopt a nationwide comparison. Although comparisons to other reference groups may also shape citizen's evaluation of government performance, I believe the nationwide comparison used in this study is a reasonable and meaningful choice. ...
... More related to fiscal policy, Karadja et al. (2017) provide evidence for how people change their preferences for redistribution once they are informed their relative income is higher than what they perceive compared to other individuals' incomes. Kuziemko et al. (2015) find that receiving information affects individuals' views on inequality, but not for taxation preferences. They shed light on the potential role of distrust in government which significantly lowers the effects of information on changing policy preferences. ...
Macroeconomic expectations influence long-term output, investment, and employment through households’ behavior. Policymakers and politicians attempt to predict the behavior of citizens and voters. How individuals form expectations and perceive sovereign indebtedness brings into question public finance sustainability and incumbents’ credibility. Based on a cross-country survey in Central and Eastern European countries, we estimate several probit regressions to uncover the effects of economic knowledge on sovereign debt expectations. Robustness tests and additional control confirm the initial results. We find that knowledge about public debt increases the chances of forming negative expectations, while higher financial literacy tends to have the opposite effect. More specifically, individuals with higher public debt knowledge are 5.4 percentage points less likely to show positive expectations, while individuals with higher levels of financial literacy (interest rate and inflation knowledge) are approximately 3.5 percentage points more likely to form positive expectations. The results indicate that public debt expectations are driven by negative biases resulting from the lack of economic knowledge together with insufficiency in understanding economic causal mechanisms. Financial literacy programs could benefit from including information about macroeconomics in curricula. Improving individual abilities to understand macroeconomic mechanisms, including public debt, has the potential to influence expectations and shift behaviors towards desired policy outcomes.
... Importantly, using a professional survey company to recruit participants ensured their complete anonymity to the researchers, which reduces social-desirability bias and other experimenter-demand concerns (Holz et al., 2023;Kuziemko et al., 2015). However, we also acknowledge the complexity of determining the direction and impact of social desirability bias in this context. ...
Despite the growing need for surrogate decision‐making for older adults, little is known about how surrogates make decisions and whether advance directives would change decision‐making. We conducted a nationally representative experimental survey that cross‐randomized cognitive impairment, gender, and characteristics of advance care planning among hospitalized older adults through a series of vignettes. Our study yielded three main findings: first, respondents were much less likely to recommend life‐sustaining treatments for patients with dementia, especially after personal exposure. Second, respondents were more likely to ignore patient preferences for life‐extending treatment when the patient had dementia, and choose unwanted life‐extending treatments for patients without dementia. Third, in scenarios where the patient's wishes were unclear, respondents were more likely to choose treatments that matched their own preferences. These findings underscore the need for improved communication and decision‐making processes for patients with cognitive impairment and highlight the importance of choosing a surrogate decision‐maker with similar treatment preferences.
... While such perceptions are partly malleable to information provision, policy views are harder to change. For instance, Kuziemko et al. (2015) show that providing respondents with information about income inequality has only a small effect on the agreement with policy measures that address it, whereas Settele (2022) provides evidence that informing respondents about measures of the gender wage gap has an impact on their assessment of some policy measures aimed at reducing it. Alesina et al. (2018) show that Americans and Europeans have different perceptions of social mobility, and that within individual countries there are partisan gaps in views of the role of government as part of the problem or the solution. ...
We conduct a survey experiment with four thousand German respondents and provide information on two measures of gender inequality, separately or jointly: the gender gap in earnings and the gender gap in pensions. We analyze the effect of information provision on respondents' views on the importance of reducing gender inequality and on their agreement with the adoption of policies targeted at different stages of the life cycle and aimed at reducing the gaps. We find that providing information on both gaps changes perceptions of the importance of reducing gender inequality and adopting policy measures to this end. Information on only one gap tends to have insignificant effects. By exploring the mechanisms behind our results, we provide insights into the importance of individual views on female disadvantages in the labor market, personal experience of inequality, and social norms as correlates of preferences for reducing gender inequality and policy interventions. We also show that information provision has larger effects on women and young respondents, while treatment effects do not differ by political leaning. These individual characteristics also relate to differences in identifying causes of gender inequality. JEL-Codes: C900, D630, J160, J380.
Public support for redistributive policies (e.g., Medicaid) depends in part on the perceived need and deservingness of beneficiaries. However, the average citizen is not well informed about the economic conditions of their fellow citizens. In this article, we explore how information about average earnings of the working poor (a group generally seen as deserving) influences support for redistributive spending. Two survey experiments test whether support for such spending is affected by information about the average incomes of low-wage occupations (e.g., home health aides and retail sales workers). We additionally explore potential mechanisms for this effect, including empathy. An exploratory study finds an effect, but a pre-registered confirmatory study yields substantively small findings with inconsistent significance. Even when participants both receive detailed information about low-wage occupations’ salaries and are encouraged to recall people who they know in those jobs, the treatment has no substantial effect. Given the strength of this treatment and the lack of consistent effects, we conclude that interventions providing information about low-income salaries (e.g., in news coverage or interpersonal conversation) are unlikely to have a substantive effect on support for redistribution.
Motivated reasoning posits that people distort how they process information in the direction of beliefs they find attractive. This paper creates a novel experimental design to identify motivated reasoning from Bayesian updating when people have preconceived beliefs. It analyzes how subjects assess the veracity of information sources that tell them the median of their belief distribution is too high or too low. Bayesians infer nothing about the source veracity, but motivated beliefs are evoked. Evidence supports politically motivated reasoning about immigration, income mobility, crime, racial discrimination, gender, climate change, and gun laws. Motivated reasoning helps explain belief biases, polarization, and overconfidence. (JEL C91, D12, D72, D83, D91, L82)
Meritocracies aspire to reward hard work and promise not to judge individuals by the circumstances into which they were born. However, circumstances often shape the choice to work hard. I show that people's merit judgments are ``shallow'' and insensitive to this effect. They hold others responsible for their choices, even if these choices have been shaped by unequal circumstances. In an experiment, US participants judge how much money workers deserve for the effort they exert. Unequal circumstances disadvantage some workers and discourage them from working hard. Nonetheless, participants reward the effort of disadvantaged and advantaged workers identically, regardless of the circumstances under which choices are made. For some participants, this reflects their fundamental view regarding fair rewards. For others, the neglect results from the uncertain counterfactual. They understand that circumstances shape choices but do not correct for this because the counterfactual—what would have happened under equal circumstances—remains uncertain.
Would consumers be willing to pay more for goods for which there is less inequality in wages across those involved in their production? In incentive-compatible behavioral choice studies on representative samples of the English and U.S. populations, we find significantly positive willingness to pay for such inequality reductions in more than 80% of subjects. Although it varies with political leaning and the extent of the inequality reduction, willingness to pay is positive across the political spectrum and for all studied inequality differences. It is higher for more intuitive and informative inequality-reporting formats. Our findings have policy implications for both governments and firms. On the one hand, they suggest the promise of universal provision of product-level inequality information as a tool for moderating income inequality. On the other hand, they highlight the potential relevance of inequality reporting for firms’ marketing strategies.
This paper was accepted by Dorothea Kübler, behavioral economics and decision analysis.
Funding: This work was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche [LabEx Ecodec/ANR-11-LABX-0047] and the Fondation HEC [Budget F].
Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.01974 .
People’s understanding of the drivers of inequality is a function of their position in the social structure. Nevertheless, the ways in which intergenerational social mobility is associated with opportunity beliefs remain under-researched. Recent findings in cultural sociology suggest that individuals seldom update their beliefs, and that settled dispositions lead people to reproduce their beliefs in their adulthood. This study used a probabilistic and representative survey of Chinese citizens to explore how intergenerational social mobility relates to opportunity beliefs. China presents an interesting context to explore this question, since Chinese society is considered to be highly unequal yet highly tolerant of social inequalities. Our results indicate a U-shaped relationship between social class and opportunity beliefs. The upper class and farmers exhibit stronger meritocratic beliefs than the middle class. Moreover, upwardly and downwardly mobile individuals show greater weights for origin and destination, respectively. Thus, opportunity beliefs are explained by the social class where they rank lower. These findings suggest that when beliefs are updated through social mobility, they interact with the mobility trajectory. In addition, the stronger meritocratic belief of the farmers’ class and the greater weight of social origin for upwardly mobile individuals could help explain the dormant social volcano in China.
Thirty-four states prohibit price increases during emergencies, and individuals take costly actions to report violators. We measure experimentally the willingness to pay to report sellers who increase prices of personal protective equipment. Over 75 percent of subjects pay to report, even if others are willing to buy at those prices. We argue that reports contain information about a desire to prevent or punish third-party transactions at unfair or illicit prices. Reports are partially driven by a distaste for firm profits or markups, implying that the distribution of surplus between producers and consumers matters for welfare. (JEL C93, D22, D63, D91, H12, K22)
Stringent policies that significantly increase the cost of greenhouse gas emissions, such as CO 2 , are increasingly necessary for mitigating climate change. Yet while richer individuals in society generate the most CO 2 emissions and thus will face the largest absolute cost burden, they also tend to be more supportive of stringent environmental policies. In this paper, we examine how information about the distribution of carbon emissions by income affects support for carbon taxation. While carbon taxation is widely advocated as the most efficient policy for mitigating climate change, it faces significant political hurdles due to its distributional costs. Using original survey data, with an embedded experiment, we find that providing information about the actual distribution of household CO 2 emissions by income significantly changes individuals' support for carbon taxation. These effects are particularly pronounced at the bottom of the household income distribution, leading to increased support for costly climate policies. However, individuals who believe that carbon taxes will reduce their income continue to hold their level of support for carbon taxation. Our findings have significant implications for understanding the public's response to the distributional consequences of the green transitions and ultimately their political feasibility.
Welfare deservingness opinions help explain welfare attitudes and hence are crucial for understanding the social legitimacy of the welfare state. However, even when considering deservingness alongside other explanatory frameworks, many open questions remain in the welfare attitude framework. This article argues that a novel research agenda focusing on welfare-state related knowledge and young people could considerably enrich current debates in deservingness and welfare attitude research. Deservingness assessments are made heuristically and could greatly depend on what people know (especially when they are misinformed). Studying this with young people is highly relevant, as the formative years are crucial for welfare attitude formation and change, even later in life. Research with young people provides unique opportunities for disentangling causal mechanisms between welfare-state related knowledge, deservingness and welfare attitudes. Moreover, it could help challenge welfare-state related misinformation and build resilience against disinformation. This thematic review outlines benefits, blind spots, and research trajectories when focusing on knowledge and young people in deservingness and welfare attitude research.
Surveys measuring happiness or preferences generate discrete ordinal data. Ordered response models, which are used to analyze such data, suffer from an identification problem. Their conclusions depend on distributional assumptions about a latent variable. We propose using response times to solve that problem. Response times contain information about the distribution of the latent variable through a chronometric effect. Using an online survey experiment, we verify the chronometric effect. We then provide theoretical conditions for testing conventional distributional assumptions. These assumptions are rejected in some cases, but overall our evidence is consistent with the qualitative validity of the conventional models. (JEL C14, D60, D91, I31)
Individual perceptions of income distribution play a vital role in political economy and public finance models, yet there is little evidence regarding their origins or accuracy. This study examines how individuals form these perceptions and explores their potential impact on preferences for redistribution. A tailored household survey provides original evidence on systematic biases in individuals' evaluations of their own relative position in the income distribution. The study discusses one of the mechanisms that may generate such biases, based on the extrapolation of information from endogenous reference groups, and presents some suggestive evidence that this mechanism has significant explanatory power. The impact of these biased perceptions on attitudes toward redistributive policies is studied by means of an experimental design that was incorporated into the survey, which provided consistent information on the own-ranking within the income distribution to a randomly selected group of respondents. The evidence suggests that those who had overestimated their relative position and thought that they were relatively richer than they were tend to demand higher levels of redistribution when informed of their true ranking.
In this paper, I use data from an exceptionally detailed survey of attitudes toward taxation in the United States to investigate the relative importance of one particular misconception - that high - income people would pay more tax under an apparently regressive reform, mostly because many people believe that the distribution of the burden of the existing income tax is regressive - in explaining public support for a flat tax and a retail sales tax, I find that this policy misconception is strongly associated with support for replacing the existing income tax with either of these two alternatives. A similar misconception about the distributional impact of the estate tax explains some of the support for eliminating that tax.
This paper explores how a trust in government shared by neighbors is associated with individual preferences for income redistribution and individual perceptions regarding income tax burden. Three measures for trust in government are used: “trust in ministries and government agencies”, “trust in diet members”, and “trust in members of municipal councils”. After controlling for individual characteristics, the key findings are: (1) people are more likely to express preferences for income redistribution when trust in government in their residential area is high; (2) people are more likely to perceive their tax burden as low when trust in government in their residential area is high; and (3) when the sample is divided into high- and low-income earners, these results are only clearly observed for high-income earners and not low-income earners.
Two experiments examined the hypothesis that the sequence of affect and cognition in an attitude's formation is an important determinant of its subsequent resistance to affective and cognitive means of persuasion. Affect-based and cognition-based attitudes were induced and subsequently challenged by either affective or cognitive means of persuasion. As predicted, affect-based attitudes exhibited more change under affective means of persuasion than under cognitive means of persuasion. Cognition-based attitudes, on the other hand, exhibited equal change under both forms of persuasion. The interaction between attitude type and means of persuasion emerged both when affect was manipulated subliminally (Exp 1) and when affect was manipulated supraliminally (Exp 2). In the 2nd experiment, affect-based attitudes were expressed with greater confidence than their cognition-based counterparts. Findings underscore the theoretical as well as practical importance of distinguishing between affect- and cognition-based attitudes and the need for influence attempts to make contact with an attitude's origin. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Rising income inequality has been a defining trend of the past generation, yet we know little about its impact on social policy formation. We evaluate two dominant views about public opinion on rising inequality: that Americans do not care much about inequality of outcomes, and that a rise in inequality will lead to an increase in demand for government redistribution. Using time series data on views about income inequality and social policy preferences in the 1980s and 1990s from the General Social Survey, we find little support for these views. Instead, Americans do tend to object to inequality and increasingly believe government should act to redress it, but not via traditional redistributive programs. We examine several alternative possibilities and provide a broad analytical framework for reinterpreting social policy preferences in the era of rising inequality. Our evidence suggests that Americans may be unsure or uninformed about how to address rising inequality and thus swayed by contemporaneous debates. However, we also find that Americans favor expanding education spending in response to their increasing concerns about inequality. This suggests that equal opportunity may be more germane than income redistribution to our understanding of the politics of inequality.
We report the results of the first large-scale experiment involving paid political advertising. During the opening months of a 2006 gubernatorial campaign, approximately $2 million of television and radio advertising on behalf of the incumbent candidate was deployed experimentally. In each experimental media market, the launch date and volume of television advertising were randomly assigned. In order to gauge movement in public opinion, a tracking poll conducted brief telephone interviews with approximately 1,000 registered voters each day and a brief follow-up one month after the conclusion of the television campaign. Results indicate that televised ads have strong but short-lived effects on voting preferences. The ephemeral nature of these effects is more consistent with psychological models of priming than with models of on-line processing.
Scholars of political behavior increasingly embed experimental designs in opinion surveys by randomly assigning respondents alternative versions of questionnaire items. Such experi-ments have major advantages: they are simple to implement and they dodge some of the difficulties of making inferences from conventional survey data. But survey experiments are no panacea. We identify problems of inference associated with typical uses of survey experi-ments in political science and highlight a range of difficulties, some of which have straightfor-ward solutions within the survey-experimental approach and some of which can be dealt with only by exercising greater caution in interpreting findings and bringing to bear alterna-tive strategies of research.
This study reevaluates the persuasive impact of emotional visual appeals within politics and examines two different explanations for their effects. One possibility is that the effects of emotive visual images are essentially superficial in nature, consistent with the view that feelings aroused by an affective image are transferred somewhat mechanically to a political candidate or cause with which it is paired. This transfer-of-affect explanation suggests that emotional appeals may work best among the least informed voters or those paying the least attention to a persuasive political message. The second possibility is that emotional appeals work via passionate reason, in which affective responses to an emotive image are integrated with, and potentially bias, reasoned thought about the accompanying message. This integrated approach leads to the counterintuitive prediction that individuals who are most highly involved in an issue (and who know the most about it) are most influenced by emotional imagery. This prediction arises from growing evidence that people highly involved in value-laden social issues generate the strongest emotional responses to issue-related persuasive appeals. These two models were tested in a study in which undergraduate students were presented with a picture of a cute or an ugly animal and a flyer from an organization advocating a pro- or anti-environment stance with respect to preserving the animal's habitat. The responses showed that emotive imagery was most persuasive among the most involved environment supporters, providing clear evidence of passionate reasoning.
Online labor markets such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) offer an unprecedented opportunity to run economic game experiments quickly and inexpensively. Using Mturk, we recruited 756 subjects and examined their behavior in four canonical economic games, with two payoff conditions each: a stakes condition, in which subjects' earnings were based on the outcome of the game (maximum earnings of $1); and a no-stakes condition, in which subjects' earnings are unaffected by the outcome of the game. Our results demonstrate that economic game experiments run on MTurk are comparable to those run in laboratory settings, even when using very low stakes.
A longstanding idea in the literature on human cooperation is that cooperation should be reinforced when conditional cooperators are more likely to interact. In the context of social networks, this idea implies that cooperation should fare better in highly clustered networks such as cliques than in networks with low clustering such as random networks. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a series of web-based experiments, in which 24 individuals played a local public goods game arranged on one of five network topologies that varied between disconnected cliques and a random regular graph. In contrast with previous theoretical work, we found that network topology had no significant effect on average contributions. This result implies either that individuals are not conditional cooperators, or else that cooperation does not benefit from positive reinforcement between connected neighbors. We then tested both of these possibilities in two subsequent series of experiments in which artificial seed players were introduced, making either full or zero contributions. First, we found that although players did generally behave like conditional cooperators, they were as likely to decrease their contributions in response to low contributing neighbors as they were to increase their contributions in response to high contributing neighbors. Second, we found that positive effects of cooperation were contagious only to direct neighbors in the network. In total we report on 113 human subjects experiments, highlighting the speed, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness of web-based experiments over those conducted in physical labs.
The traditional epidemiologic modes of data collection, including paper-and-pencil questionnaires and interviews, have several limitations, such as decreasing response rates over the last decades and high costs in large study populations. The use of Web-based questionnaires may be an attractive alternative but is still scarce in epidemiologic research because of major concerns about selective nonresponse and reliability of the data obtained. The authors discuss advantages and disadvantages of Web-based questionnaires and current developments in this area. In addition, they focus on some practical issues and safety concerns involved in the application of Web-based questionnaires in epidemiologic research. They conclude that many problems related to the use of Web-based questionnaires have been solved or will most likely be solved in the near future and that this mode of data collection offers serious benefits. However, questionnaire design issues may have a major impact on response and completion rates and on reliability of the data. Theoretically, Web-based questionnaires could be considered an alternative or complementary mode in the range of epidemiologic methods of data collection. Practice and comparisons with the traditional survey techniques should reveal whether they can fulfill their expectations.
Although Mechanical Turk has recently become popular among social scientists as a source of experimental data, doubts may linger about the quality of data provided by subjects recruited from online labor markets. We address these potential concerns by presenting new demographic data about the Mechanical Turk subject population, reviewing the strengths of Mechanical Turk relative to other online and offline methods of recruiting subjects, and comparing the magnitude of effects obtained using Mechanical Turk and traditional subject pools. We further discuss some additional benefits such as the possibility of longitudinal, cross cultural and prescreening designs, and offer some advice on how to best manage a common subject pool.
According to the ‘median-voter’ hypothesis, greater inequality in the market distribution of earnings or income tends to produce greater generosity in redistributive policy. We outline the steps in the causal chain specified by the hypothesis and attempt to assess these steps empirically. Prior studies focusing on cross-country variation have found little support for the median-voter model. We examine over-time trends in eight nations during the 1980s and 1990s. Here too the median-voter hypothesis appears to have little utility.
Although it is well established that self-administered questionnaires tend to yield fewer reports in the socially desirable direction than do interviewer-administered questionnaires, less is known about whether different modes of self-administration vary in their effects on socially desirable responding. In addition, most mode comparison studies lack validation data and thus cannot separate the effects of differential nonresponse bias from the effects of differences in measurement error. This paper uses survey and record data to examine mode effects on the reporting of potentially sensitive information by a sample of recent university graduates. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of three modes of data collection—conventional computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI), interactive voice recognition (IVR), and the Web—and were asked about both desirable and undesirable attributes of their academic experiences. University records were used to evaluate the accuracy of the answers and to examine differences in nonresponse bias by mode. Web administration increased the level of reporting of sensitive information and reporting accuracy relative to conventional CATI, with IVR intermediate between the other two modes. Both mode of data collection and the actual status of the respondent influenced whether respondents found an item sensitive.
In a general equilibrium model of a labor economy, the size of government, measured by the share of income redistributed, is determined by majority rule. Voters rationally anticipate the disincentive effects of taxation on the labor-leisure choices of their fellow citizens and take the effect into account when voting. The share of earned income redistributed depends on the voting rule and on the distribution of productivity in the economy. Under majority rule, the equilibrium tax share balances the budget and pays for the voters' choices. The principal reasons for increased size of government implied by the model are extensions of the franchise that change the position of the decisive voter in the income distribution and changes in relative productivity. An increase in mean income relative to the income of the decisive voter increases the size of government.
Even people with income below average will not support high rates of redistribution, because of the prospect of upward mobility: they take into account the fact the they, or their children, may move up in the income distribution, and therefore be hurt by high tax rates. This "intuitive" hypothesis is commonly advanced as part of the explanation for why democracies, where a relatively poor majority holds the political power, do not engage in large-scale expropriation and redistribution. But does it make sense, or does it require that some of the poor overemphasize the prospects of good outcomes relative to bad ones, due either to irrationally optimistic expectations or to a form of risk-loving?
We compare answers to policy questions by economic experts and a representative sample of the US population. We find a 35 percentage point difference between the two groups. This gap is only partially explained by differences in ideological or personal characteristics of the two samples. Interestingly, the difference is the largest on the questions where economists agree the most and where there is the largest amount of literature. Informing people of the expert opinions does not seem to have much of an impact. Ordinary people seem to be skeptical of the implicit assumptions embedded into the economists' answers.
Crime and welfare are now widely viewed as "coded" issues that activate white Americans' negative views of blacks without explicitly raising the "race card." But does the desire of whites to combat crime or curtail welfare really stem from their dislike of blacks? Are these not pressing problems about which Americans rightly should be concerned--apart from any associations these issues may have with race? In this paper I assess the extent to which white Americans' opposition to welfare is rooted in their attitudes toward blacks. Using conventional survey modeling techniques and a randomized survey-based experiment from a national telephone survey, I find that racial attitudes are the single most important influence on whites' welfare views. I also show that whites hold similar views of comparably described black and white welfare mothers, but that negative views of black welfare mothers are more politically potent, generating greater opposition to welfare than comparable views of white welfare mothers.
This paper analyzes the problem of optimal taxation of top labour incomes. We develop a model where top incomes respond to marginal tax rates through three channels: (1) the standard supply-side channel through reduced economic activity, (2) the tax avoidance channel, (3) the compensation bargaining channel through efforts in influencing own pay setting. We derive the optimal top tax rate formula as a function of the three elasticities corresponding to those three channels of responses. The first elasticity (supply side) is the sole real factor limiting optimal top tax rates. The optimal tax system should be designed to minimize the second elasticity (avoidance) through tax enforcement and tax neutrality across income forms, in which case the second elasticity becomes irrelevant. The optimal top tax rate increases with the third elasticity (bargaining) as bargaining efforts are zero-sum in aggregate. We then analyze top income and top tax rate data in 18 OECD countries. There is a strong correlation between cuts in top tax rates and increases in top 1% income shares since 1975, implying that the overall elasticity is large. But top income share increases have not translated into higher economic growth, consistent with the zero-sum bargaining model. This suggests that the first elasticity is modest in size and that the overall effect comes mostly from the third elasticity. Consequently, socially optimal top tax rates might possibly be much higher than what is commonly assumed.
To what extent do personal circumstances, as compared to ideological dispositions, drive voters’ preferences on welfare policy? Addressing this question is difficult because a person's ideological position can be an outcome of material interest rather than an independent source of preferences. The article deals with this empirical challenge using an original panel study carried out over four years, tracking the labor market experiences and the political attitudes of a national sample of Americans before and after the eruption of the financial crisis. The analysis shows that the personal experience of economic hardship, particularly the loss of a job, had a major effect on increasing support for welfare spending. This effect was appreciably larger among Republicans than among Democrats, a result that was not simply due to a “ceiling effect.” However the large attitudinal shift was short lived, dissipating as individuals’ employment situations improved. The results indicate that the personal experience of an economic shock has a sizable, yet overall transient effect on voters’ social policy preferences.
Disagreements about the optimal level of wealth inequality underlie policy debates ranging from taxation to welfare. We attempt to insert the desires of "regular" Americans into these debates, by asking a nationally representative online panel to estimate the current distribution of wealth in the United States and to "build a better America" by constructing distributions with their ideal level of inequality. First, respondents dramatically underestimated the current level of wealth inequality. Second, respondents constructed ideal wealth distributions that were far more equitable than even their erroneously low estimates of the actual distribution. Most important from a policy perspective, we observed a surprising level of consensus: All demographic groups-even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution such as Republicans and the wealthy-desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.
© The Author(s) 2011.
People’s preferences for state intervention in social policies vary. A cross-section analysis on individual-level survey data is conducted here over 33 democracies to highlight the link between the economic position of agents and their specific demand for redistribution. Controlling for a number of factors usually found to affect individual preferences in the literature, this article focuses on the role played by the occupational status of individuals in shaping their preferences. Individual labour market position, as well as family income, is shown to outweigh all other factors shaping preferences for redistribution. The odds of a manager to oppose redistributive policies are increased by 40%, as compared to those of an office clerk, for instance. Moreover, individuals’ perception of personal mobility plays an important role: the odds of holding more positive attitudes towards redistribution are up by 32% for people who think they experienced a downward mobility within the last ten years. Evidence is also found for the fact that the political regime may have a long lasting effect on collective preferences: living in former-East Germany doubles the odds of holding positive attitudes towards redistribution, as compared to living in West Germany. Finally, the research presented here identifies which socio-political groups may be formed on the basis of their preferences for redistribution.
Do rational and emotional appeals produce persuasion via the same process? We examined this question by exposing subjects experiencing a positive or neutral mood to a counterattitudinal message comprising strong or weak, rational or emotional arguments. Persuasion in response to rational messages was best accounted for by current models of persuasion: attitude change was mediated by the valence of the cognitive responses generated in neutral mood conditions but not in positive mood conditions. Persuasion in response to emotional messages, however, was best explained by a model which allowed for both the cognitive and affective mediation of persuasion: attitude change was mediated by the valence of both cognitive and affective responses generated in neutral mood conditions but these mechanisms were again disrupted in the positive mood conditions.
A growing number of studies test the effects of news framing on citizens' understanding of politics. By employing experimental designs, these studies report significant effects for a multitude of issues and frames. However, what happens to the framing effect after initial exposure? Based on a "classic" framing experiment (n = 625), this article traces framing effects across a number of delayed time points: after 1 day, 1 week, and 2 weeks. Our results show that framing effects are surprisingly persistent. The duration of framing effects depended on a person's level of political knowledge, with moderately knowledgeable individuals displaying most persistent framing effects. Effects on individuals with high or low levels of political knowledge dissipated much quicker.
This article presents the results of the first Deliberative Poll, in which a national British sample discussed the issue of rising crime and what to do about it. We describe Deliberative Polling and its rationale, the representativeness of the deliberative sample, the extent to which the participants acquired factual information about the issue and about politics generally, and how much and how they changed their views. We also weigh the extent to which such changes of view hinge on small group influences versus information gains.
In 2001 and 2003, the Bush administration engineered two enormous tax cuts primarily benefiting very wealthy taxpayers. Most Americans supported these tax cuts. I argue that they did so not because they were indifferent to economic inequality, but because they largely failed to connect inequality and public policy. Three out of every four people polled said that the difference in incomes between rich people and poor people has increased in the past 20 years, and most of them added that that is a bad thingeven in the case of the estate tax, which only affects the wealthiest one or two percent of taxpayers. Public opinion in this instance was ill informed, insensitive to some of the most important implications of the tax cuts, and largely disconnected from (or misconnected to) a variety of relevant values and material interests. a
Individual perceptions of income distribution play a vital role in political economy and public finance models, yet there is little evidence regarding their origins or accuracy. This study examines how individuals form these perceptions and posits that systematic biases arise from the extrapolation of information extracted from reference groups. A tailored household survey provides original evidence on the significant biases in individuals’ evaluations of their own relative position in the distribution. Furthermore, the data supports the hypothesis that the selection process into the reference groups is the source of those biases. Finally, this study also assesses the practical relevance of these biases by examining their impact on attitudes towards redistributive policies. An experimental design incorporated into the survey provides consistent information on the own ranking within the income distribution to a randomly selected group of respondents. Confronting agents’ biased perceptions with this information has a significant effect on their stated preferences for redistribution. Those who had overestimated their relative position and thought of themselves relatively richer than they were demand higher levels of redistribution when informed of their true ranking. This relationship between biased perceptions and political attitudes provides an alternative explanation for the relatively low degree of redistribution observed in modern democracies.
Behavioral economics and cognitive psychology have demonstrated that people deviate from ideal precepts of rationality in many settings, showing inconsistent judgment in the face of framing and other formal manipulations of the presentation of problems. This article summarizes the finding of original experiments about subjects' perceptions of aspects of tax-law design and argues for the relevance of behavioral perspectives to the understanding and improvement of real-world fiscal systems. We show that in evaluating tax systems, subjects are vulnerable to a wide range of heuristics and biases, leading to inconsistent judgment and evaluation. The prevalence of these biases suggests that there is room for skillful politicians to manipulate public opinion, and that tax-system design can be volatile on account of the possibility of eliciting preference reversals through purely formal rhetorical means. More troubling, the findings suggest a likely and persistent wedge between observed and optimal public finance systems.
Politicians routinely appeal to the emotions of voters, a practice critics claim subverts the rational decision making on which democratic processes properly rest. But we know little about how emotional appeals actually influence voting behavior. This study demonstrates, for the first time, that political ads can change the way citizens get involved and make choices simply by using images and music to evoke emotions. Prior research suggests voters behave differently in different emotional states but has not established whether politicians can use campaigns to manipulate emotions and thereby cause changes in political behavior. This article uses two experiments conducted during an actual election to show that: (1) cueing enthusiasm motivates participation and activates existing loyalties; and (2) cueing fear stimulates vigilance, increases reliance on contemporary evaluations, and facilitates persuasion. These results suggest campaigns achieve their goals in part by appealing to emotions, and emotional appeals can promote democratically desirable behavior.
Public opinion research demonstrates that citizens' opinions depend on elite rhetoric and interpersonal conversations. Yet, we continue to have little idea about how these two forces interact with one another. In this article, we address this issue by experimentally examining how interpersonal conversations affect (prior) elite framing effects. We find that conversations that include only common perspectives have no effect on elite framing, but conversations that include conflicting perspectives eliminate elite framing effects. We also introduce a new individual level moderator of framing effects—called “need to evaluate”—and we show that framing effects, in general, tend to be short-lived phenomena. In the end, we clarify when elites can and cannot use framing to influence public opinion and how interpersonal conversations affect this process.
Scholars have documented the deficiencies in political knowledge among American citizens. Another problem, misinformation, has received less attention. People are misinformed when they confidently hold wrong beliefs. We present evidence of misinformation about welfare and show that this misinformation acts as an obstacle to educating the public with correct facts. Moreover, widespread misinformation can lead to collective preferences that are far different from those that would exist if people were correctly informed. The misinformation phenomenon has implications for two currently influential scholarly literatures: the study of political heuristics and the study of elite persuasion and issue framing.
Online labor markets have great potential as platforms for conducting experiments, as they provide immediate access to a large and diverse subject pool and allow researchers to conduct randomized controlled trials. We argue that online experiments can be just as valid – both internally and externally – as laboratory and field experiments, while requiring far less money and time to design and to conduct. In this paper, we first describe the benefits of conducting experiments in online labor markets; we then use one such market to replicate three classic experiments and confirm their results. We confirm that subjects (1) reverse decisions in response to how a decision-problem is framed, (2) have pro-social preferences (value payoffs to others positively), and (3) respond to priming by altering their choices. We also conduct a labor supply field experiment in which we confirm that workers have upward sloping labor supply curves. In addition to reporting these results, we discuss the unique threats to validity in an online setting and propose methods for coping with these threats. We also discuss the external validity of results from online domains and explain why online results can have external validity equal to or even better than that of traditional methods, depending on the research question. We conclude with our views on the potential role that online experiments can play within the social sciences, and then recommend software development priorities and best practices.
Gender is one of the most frequently studied variables within the ethics literature. In prior studies that find gender differences,
females consistently report more ethical responses than males. However, prior research also indicates that females are more
prone to responding in a socially desirable fashion. Consequently, it is uncertain whether gender differences in ethical decision-making
exist because females are more ethical or perhaps because females are more prone to the social desirability response bias.
Using a sample of 30 scenarios from prior studies that find gender differences, we examine whether these gender differences
remain robust once social desirability is controlled for in the analysis. Our data suggest that the effect of gender on ethical
decision-making is largely attenuated once social desirability is included in the analysis. In essence, the social desirability
response bias appears to be driving a significant portion of the relationship between gender and ethical decision-making.
We discuss several important research implications of this study.
Keywordsgender–social desirability response bias–ethics research
Wealth inequality has significant psychological, physiological, societal, and economic costs. In six experiments, we investigated how seemingly innocuous, culturally pervasive ideas can help maintain and further wealth inequality. Specifically, we tested whether the concept of choice, which is deeply valued in American society, leads Americans to act in ways that perpetuate wealth inequality. Thinking in terms of choice, we argue, activates the belief that life outcomes stem from personal agency, not societal factors, and thereby leads people to justify wealth inequality. The results showed that highlighting the concept of choice makes people less disturbed by facts about existing wealth inequality in the United States, more likely to underestimate the role of societal factors in individuals' successes, less likely to support the redistribution of educational resources, and less likely to support raising taxes on the rich-even if doing so would help resolve a budget deficit crisis. These findings indicate that the culturally valued concept of choice contributes to the maintenance of wealth inequality.
Preferences for redistribution may be influenced by values and beliefs about distributive justice as well as by self-interest. People may prefer more redistribution to the poor if they believe that poverty is caused by circumstances beyond individual control. Therefore, beliefs about the causes of income may affect demand for redistribution. Alternatively, the effect of these beliefs on redistributive preferences may be spurious if they are correlated with income, and self-interest is not properly controlled for. They may also measure incentive cost concerns. Using social survey data, I find that self-interest cannot explain the effect of these beliefs on redistributive preferences.
What drives people’s support of governmental reduction of income inequality? We employ data from a large international survey in order to evaluate the explanatory power of three competing forces, referred to as the ‘homo oeconomicus effect’, the ‘public values effect’, and the ‘social rivalry effect’. The empirical analysis reveals that at the aggregate level all three effects play a significant role in shaping individual preferences for political redistribution. Attitudes of citizens in formerly socialist countries turn out to differ from those of western citizens in a systematic way.
Cooperation, where one individual incurs a cost to help another, is a fundamental building block of the natural world and human society. It has been suggested that costly punishment can promote the evolution of cooperation, with the threat of punishment deterring free-riders. Recent experiments, however, have revealed the existence of 'antisocial' punishment, where non-cooperators punish cooperators. While various theoretical models find that punishment can promote the evolution of cooperation, these models a priori exclude the possibility of antisocial punishment. Here we extend the standard theory of optional public goods games to include the full set of punishment strategies. We find that punishment no longer increases cooperation, and that selection favours substantial levels of antisocial punishment for a wide range of parameters. Furthermore, we conduct behavioural experiments, showing results consistent with our model predictions. As opposed to an altruistic act that promotes cooperation, punishment is mostly a self-interested tool for protecting oneself against potential competitors.
Interpersonal preferencespreferences that depend on the characteristics of othersare typically hard to infer from observable individual behavior. As an alternative approach, this paper uses survey data to investigate interpersonal preferences. I show that self-reported attitudes toward welfare spending are determined not only by financial self-interest but also by interpersonal preferences. These interpersonal preferences are characterized by a negative exposure effectindividuals decrease their support for welfare as the welfare recipiency rate in their community risesand racial group loyaltyindividuals increase their support for welfare spending as the share of local recipients from their own racial group rises. These findings help to explain why levels of welfare benefits are relatively low in racially heterogeneous states.
This paper evaluates a pilot program run by a company called OPOWER, previously known as Positive Energy, to mail home energy reports to residential utility consumers. The reports compare a household’s energy use to that of its neighbors and provide energy conservation tips. Using data from randomized natural field experiment at 80,000 treatment and control households in Minnesota, I estimate that the monthly program reduces energy consumption by 1.9 to 2.0 percent relative to baseline. In a treatment arm receiving reports each quarter, the effects decay in the months between letters and again increase upon receipt of the next letter. This suggests either that the energy conservation information is not useful across seasons or, perhaps more interestingly, that consumers’ motivation or attention is malleable and non-durable. I show that “profiling,” or using a statistical decision rule to target the program at households whose observable characteristics suggest larger treatment effects, could substantially improve cost effectiveness in future programs. The effects of this program provide additional evidence that non-price “nudges” can substantially affect consumer behavior.
This paper presents new homogeneous series on top shares of income and wages from 1913 to 1998 in the United States using
individual tax returns data. Top income and wages shares display a U-shaped pattern over the century. Our series suggest that
the large shocks that capital owners experienced during the Great Depression and World War II have had a permanent effect
on top capital incomes. We argue that steep progressive income and estate taxation may have prevented large fortunes from
fully recovering from these shocks. Top wage shares were flat before World War II, dropped precipitously during the war, and
did not start to recover before the late 1960s but are now higher than before World War II. As a result, the working rich
have replaced the rentiers at the top of the income distribution.
Just like economists, voters have conflicting views about redistributive taxation because they estimate its incentive costs differently. We model rational agents as trying to learn from their dynastic income mobility experience the relative importance of effort and predetermined factors in the generation of income inequality and therefore the magnitude of these incentive costs. In the long run 'left-wing dynasties' believing less in individual effort and voting for more redistribution coexist with 'right-wing dynasties.' This allows us to explain why individual mobility experience and not only current income matters for political attitudes and how persistent differences in perceptions about social mobility can generate persistent differences in redistribution across countries. Copyright 1995, the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection as well as empirical evidence on the effects of patent rights. Then, the second part considers the international aspects of IPR protection. In summary, this paper draws the following conclusions from the literature. Firstly, different patent policy instruments have different effects on R&D and growth. Secondly, there is empirical evidence supporting a positive relationship between IPR protection and innovation, but the evidence is stronger for developed countries than for developing countries. Thirdly, the optimal level of IPR protection should tradeoff the social benefits of enhanced innovation against the social costs of multiple distortions and income inequality. Finally, in an open economy, achieving the globally optimal level of protection requires an international coordination (rather than the harmonization) of IPR protection.
This paper examines the associations among social desirability response bias, cultural constructs and gender. The study includes the responses of 1537 students from 12 countries including Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, Nepal, South Africa, Spain, and the United States. The results of the analysis indicate that, on average, social desirability response bias decreases (increases) as a country’s Individualism (Uncertainty Avoidance) increases. The analysis also indicates that women scored significantly higher on Paulhus’ Image Management Subscale on an overall basis and for seven of the 12 country comparisons. This research serves as a caution when considering the research findings of prior international survey-based ethics research that do not include a direct measure of social desirability response bias. For example, the finding that women score higher on Paulhus’ measure of social desirability response bias calls into question prior research that does not control for social desirability response bias indicating women are more ethically sensitive than men. Copyright Springer 2006
The poor favour redistribution and the rich oppose it, but that is not all. Social mobility may make some of today’s poor into tomorrow’s rich and since redistributive policies do not change often, individual preferences for redistribution should depend on the extent and the nature of social mobility. We estimate the determinants of preferences for redistribution using individual level data from the US, and we find that individual support for redistribution is negatively affected by social mobility. Furthermore, the impact of mobility on attitudes towards redistribution is affected by individual perceptions of fairness in the mobility process. People who believe that the American society offers equal opportunities to all are more averse to redistribution in the face of increased mobility. On the other hand, those who see the social rat race as a biased process do not see social mobility as an alternative to redistributive policies.