Individual Determinants of Social Fairness Assessments: The Case of Germany
Tanja Hennighausen,
Friedrich Heinemann and
Ivo Bischoff ()
No 08-063, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research
Abstract:
In this contribution we study the determinants of how individuals assess the social fairness of a given income distribution. We propose an analytical framework distinguishing between potential impact factors related to the following fields: first fairness preferences, second beliefs on the sources of economic success and the functioning of democracy and third selfinterest. We test this framework on representative survey data for Germany for the years 1991, 2000 and 2004. Our results indicate that self-interest, beliefs and fairness preferences jointly shape fairness assessments. In addition, a number of personal characteristics are found to be important: Compared to their western fellow citizens, people born in GDR have a more critical view at social fairness. A particularly strong impact is related to the belief on the functioning of the democratic system. This points an important role of procedural fairness for the acceptance of a given distribution.
Keywords: fairness preferences; economic beliefs; ALLBUS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 C42 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/24759/1/dp08063.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:zewdip:7386
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().