Keeping Up or Giving Up? Income Inequality and Materialism in Europe and the United States

Jesper Rözer, Bram Lancee and Beate Volker ()
Additional contact information
Jesper Rözer: The Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA)
Bram Lancee: University of Amsterdam
Beate Volker: University of Amsterdam

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2022, vol. 159, issue 2, No 9, 647-666

Abstract: Abstract We examine the extent to which income inequality is associated with materialistic values and behavior in Europe and the United States (US). In the US, existing research on materialistic behavior is largely focused on the study of shopping behavior and shows that, when income inequality is higher, individuals search for and buy products that are more luxury. In Europe, the evidence for this phenomenon is mainly based on survey questions on people’s values, and results are mixed. To determine whether these conflicting findings are rooted in methodology or reflect structural differences between the situation of Americans and Europeans, we measure materialistic behavior and values in both the US and Europe. Different types of data are used to test our arguments. In study 1, we use information on materialistic values from the European Social Survey (ESS) and the World Values Survey (WVS) to study the relationship between income inequality and materialistic values, examining the same research question in the contexts of Europe and the United States. In study 2, we use information from Google Trends to examine the relationship between income inequality and internet searching behavior both in Europe and in the United States. Hybrid multilevel models analyzing the variation in these relationships both over time and across regions show that in Europe as well as in the US, income inequality is not associated with materialistic values. However, in the US, materialistic behavior is greatly enhanced when income inequality is high. In contrast, in Europe, increasing income inequality is associated with decreasing materialistic behavior.

Keywords: Materialism; Income inequality; Google trends data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11205-021-02760-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:soinre:v:159:y:2022:i:2:d:10.1007_s11205-021-02760-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-021-02760-1

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().