Why democracies don't redistribute as much as they can: assessing the role of fairness conceptions of inequality and ideology over redistributive preferences

The classical political economy model proposed by Meltzer and Richard (1981) stands that the individual desire of redistribution depends on material interest, and therefore it depends on income. Empirical literature has shown that, while this is true, other factors account, such as ideology, fairness conceptions and perceptions of inequality. In this proposal, we aim to examine the indirect and direct effects of income level over redistributive preferences, mediated by individual’s normative evaluations of inequality. Our argument is the following: we expect income to shape normative evaluations of existing inequality, mediated by ideology, and we expect such normative evaluations to explain redistributive preferences. To investigate this relation, we analyze data from 17 West European countries included in the 9th round of the European Social Survey (2018), where a module was introduced that included questions regarding fairness of income, job, opportunities, and the distribution of wealth. With this paper, we expect to contribute to previous research on how redistributive preferences are shaped, proposing a more complex causal model. What is more important: it will shed light on why certain individuals don’t support redistribution despite the fact that they would benefit from it; also, it should help to understand why inequality increases do not always increase redistributive preferences among the population.