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How Closely do Public Opinion and Institutional Regimes Align? The Welfare State and the Citizenry's Views on Just Earnings

MDR Evans (University of Nevada)
Jonathan Kelley (International Survey Centre at Point Marka)
Nate Breznau (University of Mannheim, Department of Sociology)

Keywords: Social, political, economic, and/or cultural issues

Abstract

This paper investigates attitudes to income inequality in the welfare state. Specifically we assess empirically the alignment of public opinion on legitimate earnings inequality with a nation's actual level of "welfarism" – the pervasiveness of a country's Welfare State activities as indicated by the level of governmental social spending and by the degree of corporatist control of the labor market. Bracketing for the moment the issue of causal direction, we focus here on establishing the strength and magnitude of the relationship. Analysis reveals a moderately strong alignment. Confirming general expectations, compared to their peers in other nations the citizenry of welfarist countries favors more compressed earnings distributions, net of potentially confounding influences. Novel here is the finding that this comes about entirely because the denizens of more welfarist countries favor lower pay for top jobs, not because they favor higher pay for working class jobs. Thus the core distributional feature of the welfare state is not helping the poor, not charity, not simply reducing the income gap between top and bottom, but specifically leveling: bringing down the top, restraining the rich. Analyses is by multilevel methods (variance components models estimated by GLS with random intercepts). Data are from the World Inequality Study v2.1, with 30 countries, 71 surveys, and over 88,000 individuals with the relevant information.