“Unequal and Unsupportive: Exposure to Poor People Weakens Support for Redistribution among the Rich”, 2024-04-15 ():
Do the rich become more or less supportive of redistribution when exposed to poor people in their local surroundings? Most existing observational studies find that exposure to poor individuals is positively associated with support for redistribution among the well-off, but one prominent field experiment found a negative link.
We seek to resolve these divergent findings by employing a design closer to the studies that have found a positive link, but with more causal leverage than these; specifically, a 3-wave panel survey linked with fine-grained registry data on local income composition in Denmark.
In within-individual models, increased exposure to poor individuals is associated with:
lower support for redistribution among wealthy individuals. By contrast, between-individual models yield a positive relationship, thus indicating that self-selection based on stable individual characteristics likely explains the predominant finding in previous work.
[Keywords: economic inequality, attitudes toward redistribution, neighbourhood effects, panel data, administrative data]
…This paper proposes and tests the two potential explanations for the literature’s divergent findings by analyzing the relationship between exposure to poor people and support for redistribution among rich individuals in Denmark, an economically equal country, comparatively speaking ( et al 2020). We do so by employing a design closer to the contact-supporting studies (focusing on repeated exposure to poor neighbours, providing the basis for eventual contact) but with more causal leverage than these (a 3-wave individual-level panel design linked to fine-grained registry data on local income composition) to study the consequences of temporally extended residential exposure to poor people among the better-off. Our design thus allows us to address whether the divergent existing findings are (1) a function of the strength of causal identification in the design employed or (2) the time horizon of the studied exposure.
To preview, in within-individual models analyzed using two-way fixed effects, we find that exposure to poor individuals is associated with lower support for redistribution among wealthier individuals. Our results resonate with 2017’s findings in supporting the conflict perspective on the link between exposure to poor individuals and support for redistribution. [Why does it have to be “conflict”? Wouldn’t it be simpler to just suggest that the better you know poor people, the less you feel they deserve redistribution?] Further, we substantiate the self-selection explanation by showing that when analyzed cross-sectionally (in between-individual models), we find a positive relationship between exposure to poor individuals and redistribution support among the better-off, thus indicating that self-selection based on stable individual characteristics is a likely explanation for previous ‘contact-supporting’ findings. Our results thus support the negative effect of exposure to poor individuals on the better-off’s support for redistribution and point to one plausible explanation for why some studies have found the opposite.