Redistribution Preferences, Inequality Information, and Partisan Motivated Reasoning in the United States

In an era of rising inequality, the U.S. public’s relatively modest support for redistributive policies has been a puzzle for scholars. Deepening the paradox is recent evidence that presenting information about inequality increases subjects’ support for redistributive policies by only a small amount...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSocieties (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 11; no. 2; p. 65
Main Authors Brooks, Clem, Harter, Elijah
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.06.2021
Subjects
Data quality
Elections
Experiments
Hypotheses
Hypothesis testing
Income inequality
Inequality
inequality information
Information
Information processing
National elections
Partisanship
Party identification
Policies
Political parties
Preferences
Reasoning
redistribution preferences
Scholarship
Scholarships & fellowships
Tax increases
Tax rates
United States > US
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Summary:In an era of rising inequality, the U.S. public’s relatively modest support for redistributive policies has been a puzzle for scholars. Deepening the paradox is recent evidence that presenting information about inequality increases subjects’ support for redistributive policies by only a small amount. What explains inequality information’s limited effects? We extend partisan motivated reasoning scholarship to investigate whether political party identification confounds individuals’ processing of inequality information. Our study considers a much larger number of redistribution preference measures (12) than past scholarship. We offer a second novelty by bringing the dimension of historical time into hypothesis testing. Analyzing high-quality data from four American National Election Studies surveys, we find new evidence that partisanship confounds the interrelationship of inequality information and redistribution preferences. Further, our analyses find the effects of partisanship on redistribution preferences grew in magnitude from 2004 through 2016. We discuss implications for scholarship on information, motivated reasoning, and attitudes towards redistribution.
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ISSN:2075-4698
2075-4698
DOI:10.3390/soc11020065