DP19274 Behind the support for redistributive politics: Social preferences or beliefs?
In this paper we explore how individual social preferences correlate
with political support for redistribution. We ran an incentivized
experiment with a large representative sample of the Spanish population. Our participants took six decisions that elicited their social preferences. Their choices could result in a different total surplus and different distributions of the surplus between the subject and an anonymous counterpart. In our sample, social preferences are unrelated to political support for distributive policies. The main correlates for support of redistribution are the beliefs concerning the importance of effort versus luck for success (fairness), the trust in government institutions (effectiveness) and the perceived importance of the poverty problem (need).
