Social Status, Inequality Perceptions and Support for Redistributive Policies Among Politicians

Economic inequality constitutes a defining challenge of our time and it remains puzzling to scholars why rising levels of inequality have not lead to more redistributive policies. Recently, the literature has turned to subjective accounts of inequality and has started to focus on perceptions and individual evaluations of inequality (e.g. Gimpelson and Treisman 2018). In short, this literature shows that individuals hold vast misperceptions about the extent of inequality in their country which at least partially explains why citizens don’t demand more redistribution. However, as we posit in this paper, in order to solve the puzzle of rising levels of inequality and little action against it, a focus on politicians and their understanding of inequality is warranted. By studying political elites and thus in essence those that take the decisions about redistribution or not, we get leverage at the question whether political elites hold also misperceptions about inequality and which variables are key in explaining their evaluation of inequality. Building on recent advances in the literature to see support for redistributive policies and perception of inequality as dependent on the individual social position (Condon and Wichowsky 2018, Fatke 2018), we study the effect of social status on redistributive preferences among politicians. Taking the highly federalized Switzerland as a case, we focus on cantonal MPs (N=141). These cantons or provinces have far-reaching power over redistributive policies such as allocation of welfare and are thus the ideal case to study. In a survey experiment, we manipulate politicians’ perceptions of the socioeconomic hierarchy and their place in it to study the effects of social position on a range of redistributive policy preferences.