Income Inequality, Equal Opportunity, and Attitudes About Redistribution

Liza G. Steele

Social Science Quarterly, 2015, vol. 96, issue 2, 444-464

Abstract: type="main">

This article explores how income inequality and social mobility affect attitudes about redistribution in global perspective.

Individual-level data on over 50,000 individuals from 38 countries in the International Social Survey Programme are combined with country-level data from the World Bank, Standardized Income Inequality Database, and the Economic Freedom of the World data. OLS regression models with robust, clustered standard errors are estimated to account for the presence of unobserved, country-level effects in the error terms.

Social mobility is found to be a more important predictor of preferences for redistribution than income inequality. Specifically, those who live in countries with greater social mobility are more supportive of redistribution while individuals who have experienced upward mobility themselves are less supportive, although an upwardly mobile individual in a more mobile society is more supportive of redistribution than an upwardly mobile individual in a less mobile society.

The central finding of this study is that the tangibility of redistributive social policies may bolster support for social spending. The structures and institutions that facilitate upward mobility—and potentially attenuate some of the detrimental effects of income inequality—are generally the products of more comprehensive redistribution policies, and public opinion may reflect this.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/ssqu.12145 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:socsci:v:96:y:2015:i:2:p:444-464

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0038-4941

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science Quarterly is currently edited by Robert L. Lineberry

More articles in Social Science Quarterly from Southwestern Social Science Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().