This paper describes individuals’ inequality perceptions, distributional norms, and redistributive preferences in a panel of OECD countries, primarily focusing on the association between these subjective measures and the effective level of inequality and redistribution. Not surprisingly, the effective level of redistribution (after tax-and-transfer inequality) is positively (negatively) correlated with redistributive preferences. There is also evidence showing that the subjective and objective dimension of inequality and redistribution are, at least partially, linked with individuals’ political preferences and their voting behavior. The association between objective and subjective measures of inequality and redistribution vanishes, however, once more fundamental country characteristics are taken into account. This suggests that these characteristics explain both redistributive preferences as well as the effective level of redistribution and after tax-and-transfer inequality.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.