Fairness of inequality and support for redistribution: directly comparing citizens and legislators

Abstract

Economic inequality constitutes a defining challenge of our time and it remains puzzling why rising levels of inequality have not led to more redistribution. In this article a novel individual-level perspective is taken, with a focus on how much legislators and citizens agree on questions of redistribution and inequality, and what causes these mismatches. The study compares legislators’ views to a representative citizen sample in Switzerland. The results show considerable disagreement between the groups with legislators being more sceptical towards redistribution and seeing inequality as fairer outcome. The mismatch is only partially explained by legislators’ higher social status. Ideology plays a fundamental role as more polarisation according to ideological lines is found among elites and their attitudes are also more rooted in their ideology. In sum, the findings point to some underexplored angles of the puzzle of why not more redistribution has been observed and thus offer a valuable addition to the existing literature.

Keywords:

• Subjective fairness of inequality
• support for redistribution
• congruence between political elites and citizens
• social status
• left-right ideology

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the participants of the ECPR Joint Sessions in Mons, the Unequal Democracies Workshop 2020 in Geneva by the ERC Unequal Democracies (Advanced Grant No. 741538, PI Jonas Pontusson) and the workshop ‘New question of representation’ 2021 organized by Yvette Peters for their valuable input.

Authors’ contributions

Luzia Helfer, Université de Genève, was responsible for data collection, theory and framing, analyses, and writing. Nathalie Giger, Université de Genève, was responsible for theory and framing, analyses, writing. Christian Breunig, Universität Konstanz, was responsible for the conceptualization of the inequality module in the elite survey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 There were popular initiatives in the Swiss direct democratic system in recent years at the national level (November 30th 2014) and regional level, in the regional Geneva parliament (in 2014) and several others (SG in 2015, ZH in 2013, BL 2012, SO 2014).

2 The ethical clearance we obtained for the project does not allow us to report results by party, i.e. models with a dummy variable for each party, instead of groupings.

3 Right-wing citizens: M = 2.74, 95% CI [2.67, 2.80], right-wing legislators: M = 1.24, 95% CI [1.00, 1.49].

4 Left-wing citizens: M = 3.34, 95% CI [3.26, 3.41]; left-wing legislators: M = 3.59, 95% CI [3.30, 3.89].

5 Full models in Online Appendix C, robustness checks with ordered logistic regression in Online Appendix D.

Additional information

Funding

Data collection was financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (100017_172559). Nathalie Giger received support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (100017_178980) and has benefitted from being part of the ERC Unequal Democracies research group and her fellowship at the cluster ‘The Politics of Inequality’ (University of Konstanz) funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG – German Research Foundation) under Germany‘s Excellence Strategy – EXC-2035/1 – 390681379).

Notes on contributors

Luzia Helfer

Luzia Helfer was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Geneva. Her research interests include perceptions by legislators and their relationships with the public and media/journalists, mainly from a comparative perspective. [[email protected]]

Nathalie Giger

Nathalie Giger is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Geneva, and currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Cluster ‘The politics of inequality’ at the University of Konstanz. Her work focuses on the political consequences of economic inequality and the formation of attitudes and beliefs in general. [[email protected]]

Christian Breunig

Christian Breunig is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Konstanz. His research interests focus on political representation, inequality and public policy. Publications are listed at orcid.org/0000-0002-8074-6712. [[email protected]]