We suggest that people advocate for equality also because they fear income losses below a given reference point. Stabilizing their baseline income can make workers more tolerant of inequality. We present evidence of this attitude in the UK by exploiting the introduction of the National Minimum...

In cross-sectional studies, countries with greater income inequality typically exhibit less support for government-led redistribution and greater acceptance of wage inequality (e.g., United States versus Western Europe). If individual nations evolve along this pattern, a vicious cycle could form...

Ideally, a representative democracy awards a genuine vote to each adult. We study whether this applies in competitive democracies with an election model combining district appor- tionment and proportional representation (PR). Four classic seat allocation rules, including d'Hondt (1882), are...

This paper studies how the political elite uses nationalism as a tool for altering the preferences of the voting public. A model is designed to explain how a change in income inequality motivates political parties to use nationalism. The model concludes that increased income inequality...

In cross-sectional studies, countries with greater income inequality typically exhibit less support for government-led redistribution and greater acceptance of wage inequality (e.g., United States versus Western Europe). If individual nations evolve along this pattern, a vicious cycle could form...

Income inequality and political polarization have both increased dramatically in the United States over the last several decades. A small but growing literature has suggested that these two phenomena may be related and mutually reinforcing: income inequality leads to political polarization, and...

Using new data from a three-wave panel survey administered in Germany between May 2020 and May 2021, this paper studies the impact of a negative shock affecting every strata of the population, such as the development of COVID-19, on preferences for redistribution. Exploiting the plausibly...

Using new data from a three-wave panel survey administered in Germany between May 2020 and May 2021, this paper studies the impact of a negative shock affecting every strata of the population, such as the development of COVID-19, on preferences for redistribution. Exploiting the plausibly...

Using new cross-country survey and experimental data, we investigate if it is possible to increase people's support for the national government to address inequality through redistribution by providing them with information about inequality and social mobility in their country. We test this by...

We exploit the unpredictable nature of the labor market disruption posed by automation to investigate (i) how emphasizing different features of a potential labor market shock influences redistributive preferences and beliefs about inequality and fairness, and (ii) how such information interacts...