Document Type

Article

Language

eng

Publication Date

1-2020

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Source Publication

Journal of Politics

Source ISSN

0022-3816

Abstract

Income inequality is fundamentally relational in nature, but research on the American public’s response to it tends to examine individuals in isolation, concluding that support for redistribution is unresponsive to inequality. We focus instead on perceptions of relative socioeconomic position, which we manipulate experimentally through imagined social interactions with high- or low-status others. We find that subjects who make social comparisons between themselves and someone who is socioeconomically advantaged perceive their own status as lower, assess their own socioeconomic status more accurately, and become more supportive of social welfare spending, even though we provide no factual information about the income distribution to subjects in the experiment. Our findings demonstrate that Americans respond with support for redistribution when conditions facilitate upward social comparison. We argue for a shift in scholarly attention to the structural factors that keep rising upper-tail inequality socially invisible.

Comments

Published version. Journal of Politics, Vol. 82, No. 1 (January 2020): 149-161. DOI. © 2020 University of Chicago Press. Used with permission.

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