Preferences for Redistribution

Abstract

This paper discusses what determines the preferences of individuals for redistribution. We review the theoretical literature and provide a framework to incorporate various effects previously studied separately in the literature. We then examine empirical evidence for the US, using the General Social Survey, and for a large set of countries, using the World Values Survey. The paper reviews previously found results and provides several new ones. We emphasize, in particular, the role of historical experiences, cultural factors and personal history as determinants of preferences for equality or tolerance for inequality.

JEL codes are: H10, Z1

Introduction

Economists traditionally assume that individuals have preferences defined over their lifetime consumption (income) and maximize their utility under a set of constraints. The same principle applies to preferences for redistribution. It follows that maximization of utility from consumption and leisure and some aggregation of individual preferences determines the equilibrium level of taxes and transfers.¹ Note the inter-temporal nature of this maximization problem: preferences for redistribution depend not only on where people are today in the income ladder but also on where they think they will be in the future if redistributive policies are long lasting.

The level of inequality of a society may affect some individuals' income indirectly. For instance, the level of inequality may affect crime and some people may be more or less subject to the risk of criminal activities. But, in addition, individuals have views regarding redistribution that go beyond the current and future states of their pocketbooks. These views reflect different ideas about what an appropriate shape of the income distribution is: in practice, views about acceptable levels of inequality and/or poverty. Explaining the origin of these ideas (which eventually translate into policies via some mechanism of aggregation of preferences) implies bringing into the picture variables that go beyond the current and expected consumption (and leisure) of the individual consumer/worker/voter. Needless to say, standard neoclassical general equilibrium theory can accommodate altruism, i.e., a situation in which one agent cares also about the utility of somebody else. But altruism is not an unpredictable “social noise” to be randomly sprinkled over individuals. Altruism, or, to put it differently, preferences for redistribution that do not maximize private benefits strictly defined, has certain predictable and interesting features. Of course, this does not mean that we ignore individual income, which is indeed very important.

Where do different preferences for redistribution come from? Note that the question of whether or not a government should redistribute from the rich to the poor and how much is probably the most important dividing line between the political left and the political right at least on economic issues. Therefore, answering this question almost amounts to explaining where ideological preferences on economic issues come from, certainly an important, fascinating and difficult task. A few possibilities, nonmutually exclusive of course, have been examined in the literature. First, different preferences may arise from individual history (as emphasized, for instance, by Piketty (1995)). A history of misfortune may make people more risk-averse, less optimistic about their future upward mobility and more inclined to equalize everybody's income, as noted by Giuliano and Spilimbergo (2009) with reference to historical events such as the Great Depression. Second, different cultures may emphasize in different ways the relative merits of equality versus individualism, an issue discussed in detail by Alesina and Glaeser (2004) with reference to a comparison between the US and Europe. Different historical experiences in different countries may lead to various social norms about what is acceptable or not in terms of inequality. Third, indoctrination (for instance, in communist dictatorships) may influence people's views, as emphasized by Alesina and Fuchs-Schündeln (2007) with reference to Germany. Fourth, sometimes parents may purposely transmit “distorted” views about the reality of inequality and social mobility to their children in order to influence their incentives (Benabou and Tirole (2006)). Fifth, the structure and the organization of the family may make people more or less dependent and therefore favorable to government intervention in distributive matters (Todd, 1985, Esping- Andersen, 1999, Alesina and Giuliano, 2010). Sixth, perception of fairness matters. Most people do seem to make a distinction between income acquired by “luck” (broadly defined) and income acquired by “effort” (broadly speaking) and this distinction matters in shaping preferences for redistribution (Alesina and Glaeser, 2004, Alesina and Angeletos, 2005a. Finally, the desire to act in accordance with public values, or to obtain high social standing could also play a critical role in the determination of preferences for redistributive policies (see Corneo and Gruner, 2000, Corneo and Gruner, 2002). We will document these differences and suggest explanations for the persistence of ideologies over time in this area.

In the first part of the paper, we provide a theoretical framework that helps clarify all these various effects in a coherent way. In the second part, we review evidence discussed by others and provide novel results by using the General Social Survey (GSS) for the US and the World Value Survey (WVS) for international cross-country evidence. We begin by showing that individual income indeed matters: richer people are more averse to redistribution. Many other individual characteristics matter as well. In the US, race is an important determinant of preferences for redistribution, a finding consistent with many other previous studies.² An interesting observation is that, after controlling for a variety of individual characteristics, women tend to be more favorable to redistribution than men in many different countries and institutional settings. It is hard to reconcile this difference using only economic variables as explanations, while differences in personalities documented by psychologists may be broadly consistent with this empirical observation³. Education is an interesting variable. After controlling for income, it is not clear what one should expect. If individuals that are more educated prefer less redistribution, one may argue that they think about prospects of upward mobility resulting from higher education. On the other hand, education may bias people in favor of more pro-redistributive views as a result of ideology (left-wing views). We find that the first effect prevails in the US, but we investigate interesting interactions between education and political orientation.

We are interested specifically in the determinants of preferences for redistribution, but the modern welfare state has two main objectives: to redistribute from the richer to the poorer and to provide social insurance. Some aspects of the welfare state (think of the progressivity of the income tax) are primarily redistributive, others provide primarily, but not exclusively, social insurance (think of unemployment compensations), others (such as health insurance financed by progressive taxation) have both components, and one could go on. In theory, one can conceptually distinguish the two. Empirically, it is not so simple. Often, but not always, survey questions or any other method to extract individuals' preferences for redistribution cannot distinguish so clearly whether the subjects favor the latter or only social insurance. The problem (we feel) is serious from an empirical standpoint but not fatal, in the sense that preferences for the two are most likely very highly correlated.

The chapter is organized as follows: Section 2 presents some simple formalization that captures the effects sketched above in a reasonably exhaustive way. Section 3 reviews the available evidence on the explanations for preferences for redistribution. We organize the discussion around “variables,” e.g., income, education, and race, and we present evidence for the US, cross-national evidence and experimental evidence, whenever available, on each variable. The last section concludes.