Social preferences and political attitudes: An online experiment on a large heterogeneous sample

Abstract

This paper investigates in a large and heterogeneous sample the relationship between social preferences and political attitudes. Social preferences relate to political attitudes in a particular way: Selfish subjects are the extremists on the one side of the political spectrum – they are more likely to vote for a right-wing party, less inclined to favor redistribution, less likely to hold favorable views towards immigration and more likely to consider themselves right-wing than all other types. Inequality-averse, altruistic and maximin subjects, all characterized by benevolence in the domain of advantageous inequality, sit at the opposite end of the spectrum. Overall, our evidence indicates that political outcomes in various domains such as taxation, social security, the pension system or immigration cannot be fully understood without taking distributional preferences into account.