Abstract
In an era of rising inequality, the U.S. public’s relatively modest support for redistributive policies has been a puzzle for scholars. Deepening the paradox is recent evidence that presenting information about inequality increases subjects’ support for redistributive policies by only a small amount. What explains inequality information’s limited effects? We extend partisan motivated reasoning scholarship to investigate whether political party identification confounds individuals’ processing of inequality information. Our study considers a much larger number of redistribution preference measures (12) than past scholarship. We offer a second novelty by bringing the dimension of historical time into hypothesis testing. Analyzing high-quality data from four American National Election Studies surveys, we find new evidence that partisanship confounds the interrelationship of inequality information and redistribution preferences. Further, our analyses find the effects of partisanship on redistribution preferences grew in magnitude from 2004 through 2016. We discuss implications for scholarship on information, motivated reasoning, and attitudes towards redistribution.
Highlights
It is no secret that income inequality in the United States has been on the rise.The top 1% of the population’s share of national income grew from 9% in 1970 to 22%in 2018 [1]
Is partisanship of relevance to the interrelationship between inequality information and redistribution preferences? To unpack this question, we evaluate the null hypothesis that partisanship does not confounds the relationship between inequality information and redistributive policy preferences
Does partisanship help to explain the limited effects of inequality information on preferences for redistribution? We consider the evidence using the results presented in Starting with results for the Affordable Care Act, the first estimate indicates that a one standard unit increase in inequality information raises by 0.05 standard units the level of support for the ACA
Summary
It is no secret that income inequality in the United States has been on the rise.The top 1% of the population’s share of national income grew from 9% in 1970 to 22%in 2018 [1]. It is no secret that income inequality in the United States has been on the rise. The top 1% of the population’s share of national income grew from 9% in 1970 to 22%. The richest 1% of the population takes in 196 times as much income as the bottom 90%. Some scholars have announced a return to the “gilded age” of the late. In the face of these developments, a puzzle concerns Americans’ relatively modest support for redistributive public policy, the one proven means of reining in income inequality. While a number of specific programs and federal spending priorities are popular, many social welfare provisions as well as the prospect of tax increases tend to elicit lower levels of support [4,5].
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