Guilt aversion and redistributive politics: A moral intuitionist approach

Gilles Le Garrec ()

No 2013-53, Economics Discussion Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel)

Abstract: In mainstream economics individuals are supposed to be driven only by their self-interest. By contrast, surveys clearly show that people do care about fairness in their demand for redistribution. In this article, in the spirit of the new synthesis in moral psychology (Haidt, 2007: The new synthesis in moral psychology) the author proposes to modelize the voting behavior over redistribution as the interaction between (a) an automatic cognitive process which quickly generates intuitions on the fair level of redistribution, (b) a rational self-oriented reasoning which controls the feeling of guilt associated with fair intuitions. In addition, considering that guilt aversion depends on the cultural context, the author shows that the model exhibits a multiplicity of history-dependent steady states which may account for the huge difference of redistribution observed between Europe and the United States.

Keywords: redistribution; voting behavior; fairness; behavioral economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D03 D64 D72 H53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-evo, nep-hpe and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.economics-ejournal.org/economics/discussionpapers/2013-53
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/83640/1/769515746.pdf (application/pdf)

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:zbw:ifwedp:201353

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Discussion Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().