Biased Perceptions of Income Inequality and Redistribution

Carina Engelhardt and Andreas Wagener

No 4838, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: When based on perceived rather than on objective income distributions, the Meltzer-Richards hypothesis and the POUM hypothesis work quite well empirically: there exists a positive link between perceived inequality or perceived upward mobility and the extent of redistribution in democratic regimes – though such a link does not exist when objective measures of inequality and social mobility are used. These observations highlight that political preferences and choices might depend more on perceptions than on factual data.

Keywords: biased perception; majority voting; redistribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D72 H53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (60)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp4838.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Biased Perceptions of Income Inequality and Redistribution (2014)
Working Paper: Biased Perceptions of Income Inequality and Redistribution (2014)
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:ces:ceswps:_4838

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().