Behind the Support for Redistributive Politics: Social Preferences or Beliefs?

Pablo Brañas-Garza, Antonio Cabrales, Maria Paz Espinosa and Teresa García-Muñoz

No 11238, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: In this paper we explore how individual social preferences correlate with political support for redistribution. We ran an incentivized experiment with a large representative sample of the Spanish population. Our participants took six decisions that elicited their social preferences. Their choices could result in a different total surplus and different distributions of the surplus between the subject and an anonymous counterpart. In our sample, social preferences are unrelated to political support for distributive policies. The main correlates for support of redistribution are the beliefs concerning the importance of effort versus luck for success (fairness), the trust in government institutions (effectiveness) and the perceived importance of the poverty problem (need).

Keywords: elicitation of social preferences; income distribution and politics; trust in government institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D31 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-ltv, nep-pol and nep-soc
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Related works:
Working Paper: Behind the support for redistributive politics: Social preferences or beliefs? (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11238

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