This dissertation investigates the dynamics of mass attitudes toward redistributive social policies in post-industrial democracies: How have these attitudes changed over time? What factors and mechanisms drive these changes?
According to workhorse models in political economy, as inequality increases, support for redistributive social policies should also increase, especially among those most likely to benefit from them. Yet, despite a sharp growth in income inequality in the United States and the United Kingdom since the 1970's, there is no evidence that attitudinal trends match these predictions.
Drawing from findings in the behavioral sciences on mental processes of attitude formation and on the role of other-oriented concerns, I argue that political economy's workhorse models perform well only under specific scope conditions. Once these conditions are accounted for, observed trends become less puzzling.
First, workhorse models only capture one component of demand for redistribution, namely support for redistribution conceived as taking from the "rich" (redistribution from), and ignore a separate component, support for redistribution conceived as giving to the "poor" (redistribution to). These two facets of redistribution, I argue, prime different individual motives: self-interested income maximization on the one hand, and other-oriented social affinity with welfare beneficiaries on the other, which is shaped by social ranking and non-economic moral dispositions.
Second, attitudinal change that matches these models' predictions is conditional on whether elites politicize redistributive issues. The nature and structure of the options available in one's political environment impact the kind of choices citizens make, i.e. the motives that guide attitude formation. I show how elite competition over distinct redistributive agendas increases the likelihood that individuals will translate their economic circumstances into support for, or opposition to, redistribution.
Through a context-sensitive analysis of longitudinal survey data, I show how most of the action in the UK and the US has happened through other-oriented motives. The decline in the predictive power of income in these countries, has been mirrored in both countries by an increase in the predictive power of moral values. Differences in the choice sets provided by elite-level electoral competition help explain how this plays out differently on each side of the Atlantic
