Inequality and Redistributive Behavior (with Michael Bechtel and Roman Liesch)
Kenneth Scheve, Professor of Political Science, Stanford University
Does inequality affect redistributive behavior? Inequality is hypothesized for both self-interested and other-regarding reasons to increase support for redistribution. This paper implements a new "give-and-take" experiment that randomly varies the level of inequality between two individuals before offering one of them to either take from or give to the other individual in order to estimate the effect of inequality on redistributive behavior. We embed the experiment in surveys conducted among representative samples of citizens in Germany and the United States (N=5,000). Our results suggest that poorer individuals take on average 13\% of the richer persons’ wealth while richer individuals give about 12\% of their wealth to the poorer subjects. We also propose a method for classifying individual responsiveness to inequality and find that there is substantial heterogeneity in responses to inequality with significant proportions of individuals classified as "equalizers" but substantial proportions of individuals classified as "non-equalizers". We further show that these classifications explain variation in opinions about redistributive public policies such as taxing the rich and welfare transfers to the poor. We argue that differential responses to inequality are an important source of polarization over public policy and may contribute to the accounting for the lack of policy responses to inequality across many countries historically.
Kenneth Scheve is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute. He currently serves as the Director of The Europe Center at FSI. His research interests are in the fields of international and comparative political economy and comparative political behavior with particular interest in the behavioral foundations of the politics of economic policymaking. His research has been published in numerous leading scholarly journals and has been recognized for a number of awards and grants including the Michael Wallerstein Award, the Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award, and Robert O. Keohane Award. Scheve is also the author, with Matthew Slaughter, of Globalization and the Perceptions of American Workers examining American public opinion about the liberalization of trade, immigration, and foreign direct investment policies. He is currently writing a book with David Stasavage examining the interaction between mass warfare, fairness concerns, and the development of progressive taxation in the 19th and 20th centuries across twenty countries. His current research projects also include comparative studies examining the role of interdependent preferences in opinion formation about tax policy, trade policy, and international environmental cooperation. Scheve received his PhD from Harvard University and his BA from the University of Notre Dame. He has been a visiting scholar at the Bank of England, London School of Economics, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 2012, he taught at the University of Michigan and at Yale University.