If unequal, don’t change it? The inequality-redistribution puzzle among political elites

Abstract

Despite accumulated empirical evidence suggesting that economic inequality influences citizens’ redistributive preferences, evidence of this relationship among political elites remains scarce. This study aims at filling this gap using an elite survey data set of more than 2300 legislators from Latin America, a region with the highest levels of inequality in the world. We first examine the general association between economic inequality and political elites’ redistributive preferences. In a second step, we focus on the conditional effect of self-positioning in the left–right ideological scale. Our findings suggest a modest negative longitudinal association between economic inequality and legislators’ support for redistribution. In line with our expectations, right-wing and market-oriented legislators are less prone to support redistribution when inequality increases. However, we also find this pattern among left-wing and State-oriented members of parliament. Implications and limitations of our results are considered in the discussion section.