The Status Quo and Perceptions of Fairness: How Income Inequality Influences Public Opinion

This dissertation argues that public opinion regarding the acceptability and desirability of income differences is affected by actual income inequality. Cross-national survey evidence is combined with laboratory and survey experiments to show that estimates regarding appropriate income differences depend on (perceptions of) real income differences. When income inequality changes, public opinion "habituates" by adjusting expectations for fair levels of inequality in the same direction as the factual change. The adjustment occurs because humans are subject to status quo bias and have a motivated tendency to believe in a just world. In the context of increasing inequality in developed democracies over the last 40 years, the implication is that normative expectations for appropriate levels of inequality have adjusted up. This habituation process helps explain why increases in inequality have not been accompanied by increased demands for redistribution and why cross-national variation in income inequality is not clearly linked to public opposition to such inequality.Governmen

Lessons for COVID-19 vaccination from eight federal government direct communication evaluations

We discuss eight randomized evaluations intended to increase vaccination uptake conducted by the US General Services Administration’s Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES). These evaluations had a median sample size of 55,000, deployed a variety of behaviorally-informed direct communications, and used administrative data to measure vaccination uptake. The confidence interval from an internal meta-analysis shows changes in vaccination rates ranging from -0.004 to 0.394 percentage points. Two studies yielded statistically significant increases, of 0.59 and 0.16 percentage points. The other six were not statistically significant, although the studies were powered to detect effect sizes in line with published research. This work highlights the likely effects of government communications and demonstrates the value of conducting rapid evaluations to support COVID-19 vaccination efforts

Replication data for: The Status Quo and Perceptions of Fairness: How Income Inequality Influences Public Opinion

This dissertation argues that public opinion regarding the acceptability and desirability of income differences is affected by actual income inequality. Cross-national survey evidence is combined with laboratory and survey experiments to show that estimates regarding appropriate income differences depend on (perceptions of) real income differences. When income inequality changes, public opinion "habituates" by adjusting expectations for fair levels of inequality in the same direction as the factual change. The adjustment occurs because humans are subject to status quo bias and have a motivated tendency to believe in a just world. In the context of increasing inequality in developed democracies over the last 40 years, the implication is that normative expectations for appropriate levels of inequality have adjusted up. This habituation process helps explain why increases in inequality have not been accompanied by increased demands for redistribution and why cross-national variation in income inequality is not clearly linked to public opposition to such inequality. The dissertation starts by showing that in each of 32 countries, perceptions of occupational income inequality predict inequality ideals. The causal relationship is then established in a series of experiments. In a laboratory experiment, participants who take part in a game with unequal money prizes subsequently recommend a more unequal split of prize money than participants who play a more equal game. A survey experiment shows that the predicted adjustment also occurs with perceptions of real income inequality: survey respondents who receive information regarding true income inequality in the United States recommend larger occupational income differences as ideal than do individuals who do not receive this information. The final chapter shows that the habituation phenomenon is affected by the motivation to think of the social system as fai r: activating the system justification motive among Democrats reduces the otherwise robust partisan gap in ideal income inequalities to statistically insignificant levels. This last finding implies that the broader political context can affect the strength of the habituation process in public opinion

When and why is economic inequality seen as fair

Economic inequality is seen as fair when people believe it to be the result of fair processes, or in other words, in accordance with normative rules about resource allocation. As a result, people may support substantial inequalities of outcome as fair. There is broad agreement, within and across societies, on the normative rules that govern resource allocation. However, when people use these rules to evaluate specific instances of inequality, their conclusions are systematically affected by available information, self-interest and group-interest, and system justification. This causes divided opinions regarding the fairness of specific inequalities. Recent evidence suggests that growing economic inequality does not directly impact perceptions of fairness, but may reduce perceptions of meritocracy, thereby indirectly reducing the legitimacy of inequality

Income Inequality Influences Perceptions of Legitimate Income Differences

This article argues that public opinion regarding the legitimacy of income differences is influenced by actual income inequality. When income differences are perceived to be high, the public thinks of larger income inequality as legitimate. The phenomenon is explained by the system justification motivation and other psychological processes that favor existing social arrangements. Three experiments show that personal experiences of inequality as well as information regarding national-level income inequality can affect which income differences are thought of as legitimate. A fourth experiment shows that the system justification motivation is a cause of this effect. These results can provide an empirical basis for future studies to assume that the public reacts to inequality with adapted expectations, not increased demands for redistribution

Replication Data for: Income Inequality Influences Perceptions of Legitimate Income Differences

Contains data files, analysis code, and survey codebooks for the four experiments described in the article "Income Inequality Influences Perceptions of Legitimate Income Differences"

The Promises and Pitfalls of 311 Data

Local governments operate 311 service request lines across the United States, and the publicly available data from these lines provide a continuously measured, geographically fine-grained, and non-self-reported measure of citizens’ interactions with government. It seems a promising measure of neighborhood political participation. However, these data are empirically and theoretically different from many common citizen-level participation measures. We compare geographically aggregated 311 call data with three other measures of political and civic participation: voter turnout, political donations, and census return rates. We show that rates of 311 calls are negatively related to lower cost activities (voter turnout and census return rates), but positively related to the high-cost activity of campaign donation. We caution against interpreting 311 data as a generic measure of political engagement or participation, at least in the absence of high-quality controls for neighborhood condition. However, we argue that these data are still potentially useful for researchers, because they are by definition a measure of the service demands that neighborhoods place on city governments

The two facets of social policy preferences

Most political economy models start from the assumption that economic self-interest is a key predictor of support for income redistribution. A growing literature, in contrast, emphasizes the role of other-oriented concerns, such as social solidarity or affinity for the poor. These frameworks generate distinct, often conflicting predictions about variation in mass attitudes toward redistribution. We argue that this tension is in part an artifact of conceptualizing demand for redistribution as unidimensional and propose distinguishing between redistribution conceived as taking from the rich and redistribution conceived as giving to the poor. These two facets of redistribution prime different individual motives: self-oriented income maximization on the one hand and other-oriented social affinity with welfare beneficiaries on the other. We find strong evidence for this framework using British longitudinal survey data and cross-sectional data from four advanced industrial countries. We discuss the implications for studying changes in mass support for redistributive social policies

Does Inequality Beget Inequality? Experimental Tests of the Prediction that Inequality Increases System Justification Motivation

Past research shows that growing inequality often does not result in citizen demands for redistribution. We examine one mechanism that could explain why people do not protest growing inequality: a particular sub-prediction of system justification theory (SJT). SJT argues that humans have a psychological need to justify their social system. The specific sub-prediction of SJT tested here is the idea that inequality itself increases system justification. This could yield a negative feedback loop in which political responses to inequality grows ever less likely as inequality grows more extreme. Previous research on this hypothesis relied on cross-sectional survey data and provided mixed results. We take an experimental approach and ask whether exposure to economic inequality makes people more likely to defend the system. In one main study and two replications with varying samples, experimental treatments, and outcome measures, we find no evidence that information about economic inequality increases system justification motivation