Social Limits to Spending: Subjective Perceptions of Low Economic Status and Support for Taxes Meant to Finance Social Welfare

Abstract

How are subjective perceptions of economic status related to public support for social welfare? I argue that the negative psychological costs associated with perceived relative deprivation lead individuals to prioritize immediate over long-term income gains. Consequently, those who perceive themselves as having low status are less likely to sacrifice a part of their current income to fund welfare policies with long-delayed benefits. I test this argument using two waves of the Life in Transition Survey and two more recent waves of the British Election Survey. In line with my argument, I find that, although a lower sense of subjective economic status correlates with preferences for reducing inequality, the lower individuals place themselves in the economic hierarchy, the less likely they are to support a tax increase to finance spending on education, poverty assistance, and healthcare. While subjective perceptions of low economic status increase demand for equality, they may also limit the government’s ability to redistribute economic resources if citizens are unwilling to share the burden of social welfare. The findings suggest a subjective limit to the scope conditions of welfare state reform and the politics of fiscal solidarity and redistribution.

Keywords

social policy preferences subjective economic status inequality taxation welfare reform

Introduction

How are subjective perceptions of low economic status related to public support for social spending? An emerging literature argues that subjective perceptions of inequality increase support for redistribution (Bobzien, 2020; Burgoon et al., 2023; Engelhardt and Wagener, 2018; Gimpelson and Treisman, 2018). Related, experimental studies find that subjective perceptions of low economic status increase demand for government spending on social welfare programs (Brown-Iannuzzi et al., 2015; Condon and Wichowsky, 2020a; cf. Corneo and Grüner, 2000; Shayo, 2009).

However, this strand of research has largely examined attitudes toward social programs without considering their potential costs, i.e. higher taxes. As such, little is known about the relationship between subjective status perceptions and the contribution-side of social spending. While there is some evidence that individuals who feel low in economic status agree that the rich should pay higher taxes (Cansunar, 2021; Sands and De Kadt, 2020), it is unclear if subjective perceptions of low economic status also increase individuals’ willingness to share the costs of welfare by paying higher taxes themselves.

Income taxes are the third largest revenue source for contemporary welfare states (Bunn and Perez Weigel, 2023). As fiscal constraints intensify (Häusermann et al., 2019), social welfare expansion depends at least in part on the public’s support for taxation. While welfare could, in theory, be financed by taxing the rich, politicians tend to avoid imposing concentrated costs on specific income groups (Arnold, 1990). To understand the real-world impact of status perceptions on redistributive politics, we must therefore also consider individuals’ willingness to share the burden of social welfare programs.

This paper advances the literature on subjective inequality perceptions and redistribution by focusing on support for various social welfare policies in explicit trade-off scenarios. Moving beyond attitudes toward taxing the rich, I examine individuals’ willingness to fund public education, public healthcare, and poverty assistance by paying higher taxes themselves. Drawing on behavioral economics and social psychology research, I argue that subjective perceptions of low economic status bias economic preferences toward the present, reducing support for tax increases even when intended to finance social welfare programs.

The underlying mechanism involves the social costs of perceived relative deprivation. Because (perceived) relative poverty is associated with social and economic discrimination (Anderson et al., 2015; Coibion et al., 2020; Fennis, 2008; Nelissen and Meijers, 2011), individuals feeling low in economic status tend to prioritize immediate disposable income over long-term economic rewards. Higher disposable income allows individuals to compensate for the social costs of perceived relative deprivation, for example, by signaling status through conspicuous consumption (Sivanathan and Pettit, 2010). Thus, the lower in status individuals perceive themselves to be, the lower the likelihood of support for tax increases meant to finance policies with delayed or uncertain economic benefits such as welfare programs.

Importantly, I expect this negative effect to hold across various types of social spending, including both future-oriented investment policies and short-term compensation policies. While social policies differ substantially in their distributive effects, recipient pools, or the timing of the benefits, their impact on disposable income is more delayed and less certain compared to the impact of taxes. Of course, for specific groups of individuals, for example, the unemployed, the chronically ill, or the poor, social spending can have a direct and immediate effect on disposable income. Yet, an increase in spending on short-term compensation programs makes little difference to the disposable income of the average taxpayer who is neither unemployed, chronically ill, nor living below the poverty line.¹ In contrast, the impact of most taxes on disposable income is direct, and hence more salient, regardless of what is taxed (e.g. property, income, and capital gains) or when (e.g. monthly and quarterly).

Employing data on advanced democracies from the Life in Transition Survey (LiTS) and the British Election Survey (BES), I show that the lower in status individuals feel, the less likely they are to support a tax increase intended to fund public education, public healthcare, and poverty assistance. This association holds even when accounting for perceptions of government efficiency, political trust, attitudes toward the poor, or the perceived importance of each respective social policy. The observed association also persists across different welfare regimes and in both Western and Eastern EU member states.

Moreover, using a separate measure of support for reducing inequality that does not mention any trade-offs, I show that subjective perceptions of low economic status correlate positively with demand for redistribution. These results corroborate previous studies (Bobzien, 2020; Burgoon et al., 2023; Engelhardt and Wagener, 2018; Gimpelson and Treisman, 2018) and alleviate concerns that the association between lower subjective status and tax acceptance may be driven by status competition rather than concerns with status protection (Corneo and Grüner, 2000; Shayo, 2009; Thal, 2020). If this were the case, then lower subjective economic status should correlate negatively with both support for taxes meant to finance social spending and with support for reducing income differences.

To address concerns that the results may be specific to the immediate post-financial crisis period, or an artifact of the survey used in the main analysis, I rely on two more recent waves of the BES where support for taxes meant to finance social spending is operationalized slightly differently. The secondary analysis corroborates the theoretical argument, showing that individuals who place themselves lower in the economic hierarchy are more likely to prefer lower taxes even at the expense of cuts to healthcare and social services.

Subjective Perceptions of Low Economic Status and Support for Social Spending

A growing literature argues that redistributive preferences are influenced not only by objective indicators like income or occupation, but also by subjective perceptions of economic status (Brown-Iannuzzi et al., 2015; Burgoon et al., 2023; Cansunar, 2021; Condon and Wichowsky, 2020b; Gimpelson and Treisman, 2018). Individuals with similar incomes, education, or occupations may evaluate their own economic status differently, depending, for example, on the economic status of those around them (García-Castro et al., 2022; Luttmer, 2005; Minkoff and Lyons, 2019). Accordingly, individuals with comparable levels of objective income may diverge in their support for social spending depending on their perceived relative economic status.

Observational and experimental studies show that subjective perceptions of economic status influence social policy preferences beyond objective economic indicators. For example, Brown-Iannuzzi et al. (2015) find that those who feel lower in status favor more social spending, an effect also confirmed experimentally. Similarly, Condon and Wichowsky (2020b) show across multiple experiments that making individuals feel lower in status increases support for education, poverty assistance, and unemployment benefits. Furthermore, in an observational study with participants from several European countries, Burgoon et al. (2023) find that individuals who perceive that the income of the rich has increased faster than their own are more likely to demand government action against inequality.

These studies provide compelling evidence that subjective perceptions of low economic status increase support for social spending. However, because preferences are measured independent of costs, this effect may be overestimated. As a result, it remains unclear whether individuals feeling low in economic status are also more likely to share the taxation burden of social welfare by paying higher taxes themselves.

Subjective Perceptions of Low Economic Status and Support for Tax Increases Aimed at Funding Social Programs

Drawing on behavioral economics and social psychology research on inter-temporal economic decision-making (Callan et al., 2011; Mishra et al., 2015; Payne et al., 2017), I argue that subjective perceptions of low economic status bias economic preferences toward the present, reducing individuals’ willingness to share the taxation costs of social spending. I assume that economic (and spending) preferences are shaped by both immediate and long-term economic interests (Alesina and Giuliano, 2011). However, at any time point, economic (and spending) preferences will be dominated by either short- or long-term economic interests, depending on subjective perceptions of economic status. The lower in economic status individuals perceive themselves to be, the more likely it is that they will prioritize present disposable income over long-term economic gains. Higher present income helps alleviate the psychological costs of relative deprivation, for example through status-signaling consumption. In contrast, those who feel higher in status may face less pressure to signal status, which allows long-term interests to shape economic decisions and, subsequently, spending preferences.

Substantial evidence indicates that subjective economic status shapes time preferences, with perceptions of lower economic status biasing economic decisions toward the present. Experimental studies link subjective perceptions of inequality to delayed discounting (Callan et al., 2011), preferences for high variability in outcomes (Mishra et al., 2015), risk-taking in economic games (Payne et al., 2017), or borrowing (Banuri and Nguyen, 2023). Observational studies relying on fine-grained panel data further show that local income inequality correlates with rising household debt (Berisha and Meszaros, 2018; Carr and Jayadev, 2015; Roth, 2026).

Researchers tend to attribute this present bias effect to the psychological costs of perceived relative deprivation (Easterlin, 2003; Piff et al., 2018). Feeling poorer than those around you is, regardless of objective economic resources, psychologically uncomfortable. Economics research on the contextual determinants of well-being confirms that individuals who feel poorer than their neighbors tend to report lower levels of life satisfaction (Kraus et al., 2017; Luttmer, 2005; Perez-Truglia, 2013; Winkelmann, 2012). This is further corroborated by studies manipulating subjective status perceptions experimentally. For example, in a detailed analysis of a large sample of open-ended answers, Condon and Wichowsky (2020b) found that participants asked to imagine an interaction with a rich person tended to report feelings of inferiority and anxiety to a higher extent than those asked to imagine a conversation with a poor person.

Individuals can mitigate the psychological discomfort of perceived relative deprivation by maximizing present disposable income. This allows them to protect their status by consuming status-signaling goods, an argument supported by numerous empirical studies linking low (relative) economic status to higher spending on status-signaling goods (Linssen et al., 2011; Rucker and Galinsky, 2008; Sivanathan and Pettit, 2010). Crucially, research shows that economic status signals are rewarded in social interactions, as well as in financial transactions. For instance, experimental studies show that confederates wearing luxury-branded clothing were treated with more respect (Fennis, 2008) and rated as more suitable for highly qualified jobs (Nelissen and Meijers, 2011). Similarly, a study employing administrative data from the United States shows that lower-income mortgage applicants in high-inequality areas were more likely to be rejected or receive higher interest rates than comparable applicants in low-inequality areas, suggesting that relative economic status shapes perceived creditworthiness (Coibion et al., 2020).

In sum, individuals with a low sense of economic status are more likely to prioritize immediate disposable income to cope with the psychological and social costs of perceived relative deprivation. Thus, they will be less likely to accept short-term costs to disposable income, even to finance social spending. In contrast, because of the diminishing marginal utility of income, a reduction in present disposable income may feel more affordable the higher in economic status individuals perceive themselves to be.

A testable implication of this argument is that individuals should be less willing to shoulder the taxation costs of social welfare programs the lower in economic status they feel. The choice to support welfare spending by paying taxes resembles the choice of buying insurance or that of making a long-term investment (Jacobs, 2016). Both decisions involve short-term costs to disposable income in return for future economic benefits (Barr, 2020; Rueda and Stegmueller, 2019).

I expect this negative effect to hold across various types of social spending, including not only future-oriented social investment policies (e.g. education), but also consumption policies (e.g. healthcare and poverty assistance). While they differ in their distributive effects and timing of the benefits, from the perspective of the average taxpayer, both investment- and consumption-type policies exert a delayed and indirect effect on disposable income when compared to a tax increase. Of course, for the immediate beneficiaries of particular social policies, for example, the chronically ill, the poor, the unemployed, parents of small children, an increase in government spending will have a direct and immediate effect on disposable income. However, an increase in spending in either of these policy domains makes little difference to the present disposable income of most citizens who are neither unemployed, nor chronically ill, nor qualify for cash transfers. This is also because the main function of social welfare policies, including consumption- and investment-type policies, is not to equalize present-income differences, but discrepancies in lifetime-income, either by insuring income against labor market risks or by facilitating social mobility (Alesina and Giuliano, 2011; Rueda and Stegmueller, 2019).

Nonetheless, it is plausible for policy design to influence the magnitude of the association between subjective perceptions of low economic status and tax preferences. Individuals feeling low in economic status may be more opposed to future-oriented investment policies than to short-term consumption policies because the former tend to yield more diffuse and delayed economic returns. For example, higher education may enhance social mobility through improved human capital, but the economic benefits often materialize only years later. In contrast, consumption-oriented policies provide more immediate and tangible economic returns and may therefore be more appealing to individuals who perceive themselves to be relatively poor. Still, for individuals to gain economically from such policies, they must be direct beneficiaries, i.e. unemployed or ill. And, because the costs of perceived relative deprivation biases economic preferences toward the present, individuals feeling low in economic status will be less likely to consider the long-term benefits of social policies, for example, insurance in the case of future income loss, when deciding whether to accept a tax increase.

In contrast, tax increases affect disposable income immediately. While taxes too differ in their design or payment schedules, what matters for the argument is the direct cost taxes impose on disposable income. Thus, the negative association between lower subjective economic status and tax acceptance is expected to hold across different types of taxes, regardless of the specific asset being taxed (e.g. property, income, capital gains, and inheritance) or payment schedule (monthly, quarterly). A possible exception is indirect taxes (e.g. VAT, import duties, and excise taxes), which are included in the price of goods and services and thus paid by consumers indirectly. As such, individuals feeling low status may perceive indirect taxes as a lower cost on disposable income than direct taxes and hence oppose them to a lesser extent.

Finally, the argument does not imply that subjective perceptions of low economic status increase opposition to taxes levied exclusively on others, for example, billionaires or companies. Thus, unlike other studies, I do not expect that subjective perceptions of low status are conducive to economic conservatism (cf. Thal, 2020). Nor do I claim that individuals feeling low status oppose tax increases meant to finance social spending because they desire to outcompete the poor (cf. Corneo and Grüner, 2000; Shayo, 2009). On the contrary, I expect that individuals feeling low in economic status should still be more likely to demand redistribution in general.

Based on the argument above, I derive the following testable implications:

Hypothesis 1: The closer to the bottom of the income distribution individuals perceive themselves to be, the less likely they will be to support tax increases (on their own income bracket) to fund social welfare programs.

Hypothesis 2: The closer to the bottom of the income distribution individuals perceive themselves to be, the more likely they will be to support government action to reduce economic differences.

Before proceeding with the analysis, it is important to discuss the implication that individuals feeling higher in economic status should be more likely than those feeling lower in economic status to endorse higher taxes. Though seemingly counterintuitive, this implication aligns with the argument that economic preferences vary with perceived economic status. Due to the diminishing marginal utility of income, individuals feeling higher in economic status should perceive tax increases to be less costly than those feeling lower in economic status. Thus, for those feeling relatively wealthy, the perceived cost of a tax increase will be lower than the benefits derived from improving social welfare. This logic echoes the model of income-dependent altruism by Dimick et al. (2017), in which the rich may be just as likely as the poor to support specific social policies if they can expect future economic returns or societal benefits such as lower levels of crime (see also Rehm et al., 2012; Rueda and Stegmueller, 2019). Yet, because the value of an additional unit of income decreases with (perceived) income, individuals with a higher sense of economic status should be more willing than those feeling lower in status to also pay for social programs. Conversely, poorer individuals may be less likely to support a tax increase, not because they oppose redistribution, but because they cannot afford a further reduction in present disposable income.

Data and Measurement

The main analysis relies on cross-country data from the second round of the Life in Transition Survey (LiTS II), conducted by the World Bank in 29 countries in 2010. This is the only cross-national survey that includes measures of both subjective economic status and individuals’ attitudes toward tax increases (on their own income bracket) to support social spending. I restrict the sample to European Union member states, resulting in 15 countries (N = 16,306).² The survey is nationally representative and the average response rate for the selected sample is 37.7%. I rely on the second wave of the survey because it includes five Western European countries, allowing comparison with previous studies where the focus has been primarily on Western democracies. For robustness checks I also rely on the third wave of the survey (LiTS III), which was conducted primarily in Eastern Europe.

Support for tax increases intended to finance social spending is measured using three binary items that ask whether respondents would be willing to give a part of their income or pay more taxes if they were sure that the extra money was used to improve public education , the public health system , or help the needy . These items correspond to the three pillars of modern welfare states: welfare assistance, social investment, and social insurance (Barr, 2020), allowing me to test whether the hypothesized relationship varies by social program type. Importantly, the items condition tax acceptance on the efficient use of funds, mitigating concerns that opposition to tax increases is explained by government trust (Barnes, 2015; Faricy and Ellis, 2014), or by the uncertainty involved in delivering social services with long-delayed rewards (Jacobs and Matthews, 2012).

One limitation of these items is that both paying higher taxes and giving part of your income are mentioned as alternatives for funding social programs, inducing measurement uncertainty. At the same time, it is unclear what exactly giving part of one’s income entails. While some respondents may think of charitable donations, others may think of fundraising campaigns by local service providers (e.g. schools or hospitals). Furthermore, the items do not specify which taxes would be increased, for example, property taxes, income taxes, and sales taxes. Since taxes could differ in their perceived efficiency or fairness, voters may answer the question differently depending on which taxes they have in mind. While the items do not capture precise funding alternatives, both references to “higher taxes” and to “giving part of one’s income” plausibly signal an immediate and direct cost to disposable income. Therefore, the measures are appropriate for testing the core theoretical claim that lower subjective economic status decreases individuals’ willingness to accept a reduction in disposable income in exchange for social welfare.

The association between subjective status and tax acceptance is consistent across policy domains, but for ease of presentation, the main analysis relies on an index averaging the three binary items (alpha = 0.81). When values on one or more of the index items are missing, the index averages the remaining non-missing values. Results are robust to using a complete-case additive index, and when imputing missing values with the lowest and highest possible values (see Table A6 in the Appendix, available online).

To measure support for reducing inequality, I rely on a separate item that captures agreement with the general statement that the Gap between the rich and the poor should be reduced. Since no taxation costs are mentioned, this item captures support for redistribution in the absence of trade-offs, allowing for a direct comparison with previous research on the redistributive effects of subjective status perceptions (e.g. Bobzien, 2020; Burgoon et al., 2023).

Subjective economic status is measured with the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status which asks respondents to place themselves on a ten-step ladder where the bottom (top) represents the poorest (richest) ten percent of people in their country. The MacArthur Scale is commonly employed to measure individuals’ perceived sense of economic status in both cross-sectional and experimental social psychology, as well as in economics research (Brown-Iannuzzi et al., 2015; Cojocaru, 2014), and, more recently, in political science (Cansunar, 2021; Condon and Wichowsky, 2020a). Because the theoretical argument focuses on the relationship between a low sense of economic status and support for social spending, I reverse the scale so that higher values indicate lower self-placement on the economic status ladder.

Model Specification

Following previous observational studies (Bobzien, 2020; Brown-Iannuzzi et al., 2015; Cansunar, 2021), I model support for tax increases as a function of self-perceived economic status, controlling for objective socio-economic characteristics that could influence both subjective economic status and social spending attitudes: objective welfare, education level, age, gender, employment status, union membership, home ownership, and ideology.

The inclusion of objective welfare warrants special attention. Self-perceived economic rank plausibly varies not only with contextual factors like the economic resources of one’s community, but also with objective economic resources like income or assets. Therefore, it is important to control for objective economic status. This also helps rule liquidity constraints as an alternative explanation for the negative association between low subjective status and support for tax increases.

As LiTS II lacks self-reported income data, I follow Cojocaru and Diagne (2015) and construct an objective welfare measure of recalled household expenditures using the modified Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) equivalence scale of per-capita consumption adjusted to purchasing power parity dollars (ECE).³ The expenditures include housing costs, utilities, transportation, monthly savings, food, clothing, durable goods, education, and healthcare. While self-reported measures of monthly expenditures are more prone to human error compared to daily, diary-based, reports, Zaidi et al. (2009: 35) demonstrate that the scale gives a consistent and reliable estimate of objective welfare across income groups. In addition, Cojocaru and Diagne (2015) demonstrate that the measure matches consumption estimates from household budget surveys administered by National Statistical Offices and using longer consumption lists. Because the distribution of the scale in its raw version is extremely skewed (Figure A1), I use the log-transformed version of the variable. Figure A2 in the Supplemental Appendix shows that the log-transformed ECE scale has a more or less normal distribution in each of the countries in the sample.

However, since expenditures may differ depending on geographic location or other unobserved household characteristics, it remains unclear if the ECE scale is a reliable proxy for objective income. To address this concern, I rely on the third wave of LiTS and show that per-capita consumption is highly correlated with (self-reported) objective income (Pearson’s r = 0.93, Figure A4 in the Supplemental Appendix). Furthermore, the results remain virtually identical when the objective welfare measure is excluded from the model and when the measure is replaced with self-reported income in the LiTS III data. Likewise, the secondary analysis based on the British Election Study employs self-reported income data (since expenditures are not measured), revealing similar results.

The inclusion of ideology also warrants additional discussion. In political economy research, ideology is assumed to be an effect of economic status, not a cause. Controlling for ideology thus raises concerns about over-control (Cinelli et al., 2020). However, prior research also shows that ideology shapes economic evaluations, including perceptions of inequality (e.g. Bobzien, 2020; Evans and Pickup, 2010; Rekker, 2022). If ideology influences self-perceived economic status, excluding it will lead to omitted variable bias. I therefore control for ideology but show that the results remain substantially the same when this predictor is excluded (Model 1, Table A1 in the Supplemental Appendix). Since LiTS does not include a self-reported measure of left-right ideology, I create an index of liberal vs conservative ideological values based on four items measuring self-placement on two economic and two cultural issues.⁴

All models include country fixed effects to account for institutional differences such as welfare regime type and tax systems (Beramendi and Rehm, 2016; Berens and Gelepithis, 2019). This also addresses concerns that results may be driven by unobserved differences between Eastern and Western EU member states. While the main models assume a linear relationship between subjective status and tax support, I explore potential non-linear effects in a separate model. Additional analyses also explore heterogeneity by levels of objective welfare, i.e. at the first three, the middle four, and the upper three deciles of the ECE scale.

I use ordinary least squares regressions in the main models. To facilitate interpretation, I center all predictors and standardize the non-binary ones by dividing them by two standard deviations (Gelman, 2008). The estimated coefficients of the standardized variables represent comparisons between low and high values on each of the predictors, facilitating comparison between coefficients.

Main Analysis (Based on the LiTS)

I begin by examining the relationship between subjective economic status and the deciles of the objective welfare indicator. Most respondents place themselves between the third and sixth rungs of the 10-point status ladder (Figure 1). However, as Figure 2 indicates, there is considerable variation within each decile of objective welfare: 54% of respondents appear to underestimate their economic status, 36% overestimate it, and only 10% place themselves on the ladder rung corresponding to their actual position. The descriptive results indicate that more than half of the sample consider themselves poorer than their objective welfare level would suggest.

Figure 1.

The Mean and Standard Deviation of Subjective Economic Status Within Each Decile of the Equivalized Consumption Expenditure Scale.

Figure 2.

The Distribution of Subjective Economic Status Over the Deciles of the Equivalized Consumption Expenditure Scale.

However, although they are adjusted to household size, the expenditure data may not be an ideal proxy for objective welfare due to regional differences in spending within countries. Moreover, while previous research using self-reported income shows that the expenditure scale reliably measures objective economic status (Cansunar, 2021; Cojocaru and Diagne, 2015), recalled income data may be prone to errors. Since objective economic status may not be accurately estimated, I cannot be certain that the results in Figures 1 and 2 represent bias. Nonetheless, almost half the sample under- or overestimates their relative rank by more than two steps, suggesting substantial discrepancies between their perceived economic status and their level of objective welfare (Figure A5 in the Supplemental Appendix). These differences highlight the importance of both objective and subjective measures of economic status for the study of redistributive attitudes.

Turning to the outcome of interest, a substantial share of participants is willing to pay a tax increase if assured that the money would be spent effectively to improve public education (37%), the public healthcare system (47%), or poverty assistance (48%). However, as the analysis will go on to show, tax acceptance varies systematically with individuals’ self-placement on the economic ladder, even when controlling objective welfare and other socio-demographic factors.

Model 1 (Table 1) shows that lower subjective economic status is negatively associated with support for tax increases (p < 0.01). Moving from high to low subjective status corresponds to a 7-percentage point decrease in support for taxes aimed at funding social spending, holding other factors constant. Since predictors are standardized, this effect size can be directly compared with other predictors known to influence welfare attitudes (see Table A1 in the Supplemental Appendix for non-standardized coefficients). The effect of subjective economic status on support for tax increases meant to finance social spending exceeds that of objective welfare, education, and ideology, and matches the effect of union membership.

Table 1.

The Association Between Subjective Perceptions of Low Economic Status and Support for Reducing Inequality (M1) and Support for Tax Increases Meant to Finance Social Spending (M2–M6) Among the Full Sample and at Low, Medium, and High Levels of Objective Welfare.

	M1All	M2All	M3Low	M4Medium	M5High	M6All
Subjective economic	0.05***	−0.07***	−0.07***	−0.06***	−0.08***	−0.06***
status (reversed scale, higher values indicate lower status)	(0.00)	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)
Political mistrust						−0.08*** (0.01)
Poor undeserving	−0.02*
Objective wealth	−0.00	0.05***	0.02	0.07	0.05	(0.01)0.04***
(ECE scale)	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.04)	(0.11)	(0.03)	(0.01)
AgMale	0.02*** (0.00)−0.01	−0.05*** (0.01)−0.01	−0.06*** (0.01)−0.01	−0.05*** (0.01)−0.00	−0.05*** (0.01)−0.01	−0.05*** (0.01)−0.00
Education	(0.00)−0.00	(0.01)0.06***	(0.01)0.07***	(0.01)0.05***	(0.01)0.06***	(0.01)0.06***
Employed	(0.00)0.01	(0.01)0.03***	(0.01)0.03*	(0.01)0.03	(0.01)0.02	(0.01)0.03***
Union member Homeowner	(0.00)0.04*** (0.01)−0.01	(0.01)0.07*** (0.01)−0.01	(0.01) 0.06* (0.02)−0.02	(0.01)0.09*** (0.02)−0.00	(0.01)0.07*** (0.02)0.00	(0.01)0.08*** (0.01)−0.02*
Ideology (Higher values	(0.01)−0.02***	(0.01)0.03***	(0.02)0.03***	(0.02)0.04***	(0.01)0.02	(0.01)0.03***
= more conservative)	(0.00)	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)
Intercept	0.76***	0.45***	0.44***	0.44***	0.45***	0.45***
	(0.00)	(0.00)	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.00)
R ²	0.05	0.12	0.13	0.12	0.11	0.12
Observations	15,271	14,919	4418	4484	6017	13,657

OLS regressions predicting support for tax increases meant to finance social spending. The outcome in M1 is coded to range from 0 (strongly disagree that the gap between rich and poor should be reduced) to 1 (strongly agree). The outcome in M2 to M6 is coded to range from 0 (opposition to tax increases to finance all three social policies) and 1 (support for tax increases to finance all three social policies). All predictors are centered and the non-binary ones are divided by two standard deviations. In M3–M5, the sample has been restricted at different levels of the ECE scale: low (first three deciles), medium (middle four deciles), and high (last three deciles). All models include country fixed effects. Standard errors are in parentheses.

p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001.

Some control variables have seemingly counterintuitive effects on the dependent variable. While union membership, unsurprisingly, increases support for tax increases meant to finance social welfare, so do higher levels of objective welfare, education, and political conservatism, variables conventionally associated with lower support for redistribution and the welfare state. However, the results are less surprising if we consider the diminishing marginal cost of taxation for wealthier individuals (who also tend to be more educated and more conservative). Wealthier individuals may oppose redistribution to a higher extent than lower-income individuals, but still endorse specific social policies, particularly when these programs are framed as efficient. This may reflect expectations of future personal or societal benefits from public services (Rehm et al., 2012; Rueda and Stegmueller, 2019), or a form of altruism toward the poor (Cavaillé and Trump, 2015). At the same time, because the utility of one additional dollar diminishes in income (Dimick et al., 2017), higher-income individuals can more easily afford tax increases. Thus, objective welfare is positively associated with conditional support for social welfare because the rich are more likely to afford tax increases, not because they favor redistribution or social programs more than the poor do. Conversely, poorer individuals do not oppose tax increases meant to finance social spending because they favor retrenchment but because they are more financially constrained.

Finally, the results remain virtually unchanged when excluding objective welfare and ideology from the model (see Tables A1 and A2 in the Supplemental Appendix), as well as when objective welfare is operationalized with the self-reported income item (available in the LiTS III, see Table A9 in the Supplemental Appendix). These tests increase my confidence in the reliability of the expenditure scale as a proxy for objective welfare.

Turning to Hypothesis 2, I find that lower self-placement on the economic ladder is positively and significantly associated with support for reducing inequality (p < 0.01, Model 6, Table 1). This corroborates prior findings showing that individuals who feel lower in status are more pro-redistribution than those who feel higher in status. The results also lend support to the interpretation of the control variables in the previous paragraph and help rule out economic conservatism or last-place aversion as explanations for the main findings (cf. Corneo and Grüner, 2000; Thal, 2020). If this were the case, then we should observe that lower self-placement on the economic ladder reduces support for both tax increases and for redistribution.

Having shown that support for tax increases meant to finance social spending decreases the closer to the bottom of the economic ladder individuals place themselves, I now explore whether this effect varies by the levels of objective welfare or by policy domain, before examining alternative explanations.

Sub-group analyses among the bottom three, middle four, and top three deciles of the expenditure scale indicate that the negative association between subjective economic status and support for tax increases holds across all levels of objective welfare (Models 2–4 in Table 1). I also examine potential non-linear effects (Table A5 in the Supplemental Appendix), given that the impact of status perceptions on tax attitudes may be more pronounced among those who feel closer to the bottom of the economic hierarchy than among those who feel relatively wealthy. Figure 3 displays the expected value of subjective economic status across its full range of values and the other predictors set to their means. As expected, the predicted support for taxes declines more steeply in the lower half of the subjective status scale compared to the upper half. This asymmetry is consistent with the principle of diminishing marginal utility: the economic burden of a tax increase weighs more heavily on those who feel poor, whereas those who feel relatively wealthy feel less financially constrained and are thus more willing to accept taxation to fund social spending.

Figure 3.

The Non-Linear Effect of Subjective Economic Status on Support for Tax Increases Meant to Finance Social Spending.

The left panel of Figure 4 shows that the relationship between subjective economic status and support for taxes is consistently negative and statistically significant across all three policy domains (p < 0.01; see Tables A3–A4 in the Supplemental Appendix). However, the effect is strongest for education, suggesting that individuals who feel lower in status may view education spending as more dispensable than healthcare or poverty assistance. This may be because the benefits of public education tend to accrue more to middle and higher-income groups, whereas public healthcare and poverty assistance tend to be associated with the needs of lower-income groups (Busemeyer and Iversen, 2020; Häusermann et al., 2019).

Figure 4.

The Association Between Subjective Economic Status and the Probability of Accepting a Tax Increase to Improve Social Services.

I rely on a separate item capturing policy priorities and run the analysis among participants who identify any of the three policy domains as a top government spending priority. The right-hand side of Figure 4 plots predicted probabilities of accepting a tax increase within each policy area among respondents who prioritize that specific domain. The results show that the negative association between lower subjective economic status and support for tax increases persists even when the revenue would be used to finance their preferred social program. This analysis offers a more conservative test of the argument and mitigates concerns that the results are driven by the low visibility of the specific policy domains.

Alternative Explanations

This is not the first study to identify a disconnect between support for reducing inequality and attitudes toward taxes meant to finance social spending. Barnes (2015) argues that, while preferences for progressive taxation may reflect material self-interest, tax acceptance depends on perceived government efficiency. Other studies also emphasize political trust as a key factor in shaping support for future-oriented social investments such as education spending (Garritzmann et al., 2023) or other programs that require long-term political commitment (Jacobs and Matthews, 2012). Trust may also influence subjective status evaluations if individuals perceive systematic political discrimination against their socio-economic group. This raises the possibility that the results are driven, at least in part, by political trust.

Another alternative explanation centers on perceptions of the poor. Cavaillé and Trump (2015) argue that preferences over tax rates reflect material self-interest, whereas attitudes toward social spending depend on the perceived deservingness of the poor (see also Hansen, 2023). Accordingly, the link between subjective economic status and support for tax increases meant to finance social spending may be explained by attitudes toward the poor rather than concerns for immediate income maximization.

Model 5 (Table 1) addresses these alternative explanations by controlling for political trust and perceptions of deservingness. The coefficient for subjective economic status remains statistically significant but decreases by one percentage point. By comparison, low political trust is associated with an 8-percentage point decrease in support for taxes meant to finance social spending, while viewing the poor as undeserving reduces support by 2 percentage points. Subjective status remains an important explanation for attitudes toward taxes meant to finance social spending, even when accounting for these competing explanations.

Finally, a note on cross-country variation is in order. Welfare regime type, baseline levels of social spending and taxation, as well as inequality may affect the magnitude of the association between subjective economic status and support for tax increases meant to finance social spending. Moreover, the results may be driven by Eastern states due to their relatively lower levels of political and social trust. The Supplemental Appendix contains a detailed analysis of contextual effects using two methods that are appropriate for hierarchical data with few level 2 units: two-step meta-regression and multilevel modeling with restricted maximum likelihood estimation. The analysis shows that only a small share of the variance in tax support is explained by between-country effects (the intra-class coefficient is 0.08). While the magnitude of the association between subjective economic status and support for tax increases varies to some extent across countries (see Figure A6 in the Supplemental Appendix), this variation is not explained by pre-existing levels of taxation, social spending, or inequality (see Tables A7 and A8 in the Supplemental Appendix). The null interaction effects are likely explained by the relatively small intra-class coefficient combined with the small number of countries. Future research should revisit the question of contextual effects by extending the sample of countries.

Despite differences in trust and regime type, the association between low subjective status and tax acceptance holds across Eastern and Western EU member states. Notably, the negative effect is consistent across various welfare regime types with different levels of spending and taxation: France, the United Kingdom, and Germany (at alpha < 0.10). The findings also replicate using LiTS III data (see Table A9 in the Supplemental Appendix), indicating that negative association between lower subjective economic status and support for tax increases meant to finance social spending is not contingent to the immediate post-financial crisis period.

Secondary Analysis (Based on the BES)

I provide additional evidence for the argument by leveraging more recent data from the BES. This increases external validity by showing that the results are not time specific, i.e. an artifact of the immediate post-financial crisis period. Moreover, the secondary analysis increases internal validity by demonstrating that the relationship between subjective status and conditional support for social spending holds under an alternative operationalization of the dependent variable.

The LiTS item asks respondents to choose between an improvement in social welfare and the status quo. Since the level of spending remains unchanged, respondents incur no loss by opposing tax increases. In contrast, the BES item forces a choice between tax increases (and welfare expansion) on the one hand and welfare retrenchment (and tax cuts). This raises the costs of opposing tax increases and allows for a test of the argument’s scope conditions: Are individuals with a lower sense of economic status still more likely to prioritize short-term economic gains (tax cuts) if doing so implies retrenchment rather than a continuation of the status-quo?

The 22nd wave of the British Election Study asks participants to place themselves on a 10-point scale, ranging from support for tax cuts and lower spending on health and social services to support for tax increases and higher spending. The omission of education may raise concerns about comparability. However, since the argument does not hinge on any specific policy domain, I would expect similar results if education were included. Subjective economic status is measured in the 21st wave, conducted 6 months earlier, using an item comparable to the main analysis. Crucially, the independent variable precedes the dependent variable in time, reducing concerns about reverse causality or question-order effects. The analysis includes only those respondents who completed both survey waves.

The models in the secondary analysis control for self-reported income (equivalized according to the OECD method and log-transformed), age, gender, union membership, home ownership, education level, and left-right self-placement (since there are no items equivalent to the questions measuring ideological beliefs in the LiTS). Following prior work on tax attitudes (Barnes, 2015; Cansunar, 2021), I also control for occupational status and skill level using the social grade variable (unavailable in the LiTS data) and for white racial identity, given its relevance for perceived inequality and status (Newman et al., 2015a).⁵ Political trust is measured by respondents’ trust in their MPs (no other institutional trust items were available). I use agreement with the statement “There is one law for the rich and one for the poor” as a proxy for perceived deservingness, since beliefs that the poor are institutionally discriminated should logically correlate with the notion that they deserve government help.

Consistent with the main argument, the lower on the economic ladder respondents place themselves, the higher the likelihood of them preferring tax cuts and welfare retrenchment (Table 2). Model 3 indicates that moving from a high to a low level of subjective economic status is associated with a 4-percentage-point increase in support for austerity, holding other variables constant (p < 0.01). The effect is comparable in size to that of political mistrust, though about half the size of perceiving that the poor are discriminated against, and smaller than the effect of left-right self-placement.

Table 2.

Support for Tax Cuts and Lower Levels of Spending on Healthcare and Social Services.

	M1	M2	M3
Subjective economic status	0.02	0.04**	0.04**
(reversed scale, higher values indicate lower status)	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)
Mistrust MPs			0.04***
			(0.01)
Poor get fair share			0.08***
			(0.01)
Log income (equivalized)	0.00	0.00	−0.00
	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)
Male	0.05***	0.04***	0.04***
	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)
White	−0.00	−0.01	−0.01
	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)
Age	−0.07***	−0.09***	−0.09***
	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)
Education	−0.08***	−0.04***	−0.04***
	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)
Union member	−0.05***	−0.04**	−0.04*
	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)
Employed	0.04**	0.04**	0.04**
	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)
Social grade (High to low)	−0.04**	−0.04**	−0.04**
	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)
Owns home	0.03*	0.01	0.00
	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)
Ideology		0.19***	0.17***
(Higher values = more conservative)		(0.01)	(0.01)
Intercept	0.37***	0.37***	0.37***
	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)
R ²	0.07	0.2	0.3
Observations	1721	1463	1427

OLS regressions predicting support for tax cuts and lower social spending on healthcare and social services vs higher taxes and higher levels of spending meant to finance social spending. The outcome has 11 categories and ranges from 0 (support for higher taxes and spending more) to 1 (support for cutting taxes and spending less). All predictors are centered and the non-binary ones are divided by two standard deviations. All models include fixed effects for governmental regions.

Standard errors in parentheses. *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001.

In contrast to the main analysis, the association between subjective economic status and support for tax cuts in the secondary analysis is sensitive to controlling for ideology. When ideology is excluded, the coefficient for subjective status remains in the expected, positive, direction, but its magnitude halves, suggesting a suppression effect (compare M1 with M2 in Table 2). Suppression happens when a predictor is related to both the independent variable and the dependent variable, but in opposing directions (Watson et al., 2013). As shown in Table A10 in the Supplemental Appendix, the more respondents identify with the political right, the less likely they are to place themselves closer to the bottom of the economic ladder (p < 0.001, Model 4) while also being more likely to endorse tax cuts (p < 0.001, Model 3).

The results indicate that ideology introduces variability in the outcome, obscuring the true effect of subjective economic status when excluded from the model (Watson et al., 2013). Controlling for ideology reduces this variability and reveals a stronger association that would otherwise be underestimated, and result in omitted variable bias and Type 2 error. Since previous studies have found that economic evaluations are biased by partisanship (e.g. Evans and Pickup, 2010), I prefer the models with controls for ideology. However, the reader should keep in mind that the observed, positive association, between lower levels of subjective economic status and support for tax cuts is sensitive to controlling for ideology.

Discussion

This paper contributes to the growing literature on the redistributive effects of subjective perceptions of inequality by theorizing and testing the relationship between subjective perceptions of low economic status and support for tax increases meant to finance social welfare. The results suggest that the impact of subjective perceptions of low economic status on redistributive politics may be more limited than prior studies suggest. Although individuals with a low sense of economic status are more likely to agree that inequality should be reduced, they are also less willing to accept tax increases to fund social welfare.

The negative association between feeling closer to the bottom of the income distribution and support for tax increases intended to finance social programs holds across all three policy domains, as well as across countries with different welfare regimes and tax systems. This suggests that the hypothesized relationship does not depend on the actual distributional effects of social programs. While the cross-country analysis revealed that the association between status and support for tax increases does not vary with baseline levels of social spending, taxation, or inequality, the null effects may most likely result from low power. Future research should revisit this question when larger samples become available.

The results presented in this paper are also robust to alternative explanations such as political trust, the perceived deservingness of the poor, or the visibility and perceived importance of the three different social programs. Furthermore, the results from the main analysis (based on LiTS II) replicate when using the third wave of the survey and are also corroborated by the analysis of the 22nd wave of the BES (when controlling for ideology). Yet, because subjective economic status was not randomly assigned, it remains unclear if the observed relationship is causal. Thus, the obvious next step would be to manipulate subjective status perceptions of economic status experimentally and to re-examine the hypotheses.

Another limitation stems from the assumption that the effect of subjective status perceptions is uniform across different levels of welfare. While the exploratory sub-group analysis mitigates this concern by showing that the association is comparable across low, middle, and high levels of objective welfare, future research should investigate more closely how subjective and objective economic status interact to shape attitudes toward social spending and taxes.

In conclusion, this paper nuances the emerging consensus that subjective perceptions of inequality foster public support for reducing inequality via social spending (Condon and Wichowsky, 2020a; Gimpelson and Treisman, 2018; Minkoff and Lyons, 2019). Instead, perceptions of low status may inadvertently perpetuate inequality, especially if individuals feel that they cannot afford to bear the costs of social spending. Citizens’ reluctance to shoulder the taxation costs of social spending may result in a narrower tax base, limiting governments’ capacity to address inequality. If the public demands that only the rich finance social programs, governments may be forced to increasingly rely on targeted transfers, which are generally considered to be less effective than universal programs (Berens and Gelepithis, 2019; Jacques and Noël, 2018; Korpi and Palme, 1998).

Moreover, the results are relevant for contexts with high tax progressivity, where the poor pay little or no income tax. Since tax attitudes are a strong indicator of perceived legitimacy, understanding under what conditions citizens support tax increases to finance the welfare state is essential for the study of redistributive politics, regardless of formal tax liability. This study shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, even objectively disadvantaged individuals may agree to pay higher taxes to fund social welfare if they perceive themselves to be relatively high status.

Furthermore, this paper adds to the political economy literature on redistribution by drawing on theoretical insights on economic decision-making from social psychology and behavioral economics research. So far, demand for social insurance and social investment-type policies have mainly been considered as functions of objective and stable socio-economic indicators such as occupational profile, education, employment status, gender, or (Häusermann, 2018; Rehm, 2009). This paper shows that subjective evaluations also play a role in shaping these preferences.

Finally, the results can also inform debates over fiscal solidarity in international settings such as the EU, where cross-national redistribution depends on public consent (Bauhr and Charron, 2018). Even individuals residing in relatively wealthy economies may oppose financial assistance like aid and bailouts to relatively poorer economies if they feel low in economic status.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-psx-10.1177_00323217251414605 – Supplemental material for Social Limits to Spending: Subjective Perceptions of Low Economic Status and Support for Taxes Meant to Finance Social Welfare

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-psx-10.1177_00323217251414605 for Social Limits to Spending: Subjective Perceptions of Low Economic Status and Support for Taxes Meant to Finance Social Welfare by Laura Lungu in Political Studies

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Jonathan Polk, Mikael Persson, Jacob Sohlberg, Jonas Hinnfors, Katarina Nordblom, Robert Klemmensen, as well as the editors and two anonymous referees for useful comments and suggestions.

Author’s Note

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Comparative Politics Lunch Seminar Series at University of Lund 2023 and the Swedish Political Science Association Conference 2023.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethical Considerations

Not applicable.

Consent to Participate

Not applicable.

Consent for Publication

Not applicable.

Data Availability

This is an observational study and the data that support the findings of this study are publicly available on the website of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development at https://www.ebrd.com/what-we-do/economic-research-and-data/data/lits.html, and on the website of the British Election Study at .

ORCID iD

Laura Lungu

Supplemental Material

Additional Supplementary Information may be found with the online version of this article.

Table A1: Support for tax increases meant to finance social spending (M1–M6) and for reducing inequality (M7)—models with non-standardized coefficients (LiTS2).

Table A2: Support for tax increases meant to finance social spending among the entire sample, and at low, medium, and high levels of objective welfare (M1–M4) and for reducing inequality (M5)—models excluding the objective welfare measure (LiTS2).

Table A3: Support for a tax increase meant to finance poverty assistance (M1), public education (M2), and public healthcare (M3).

Table A4: Support for a tax increase meant to finance poverty assistance (M1), public education (M2), and public healthcare (M3), with analyses restricted by respondents’ self-reported priorities for extra government spending: assisting the poor (M1), education (M2), and healthcare (M3).

Table A5: The non-linear effect of subjective economic status on support for a tax increase meant to finance social spending.

Table A6: Support for tax increases meant to finance social spending with alternative indices.

Figure A1: Distribution of per-capita expenditure in PPP dollars by country (raw data).

Figure A2: Distribution of per-capita expenditure in PPP dollars by country (log-transformed).

Figure A3: The distribution of the log transformed equivalized per—capita expenditure scale across countries—not adjusted to PPP (LiTS2).

Figure A4: The correlation of self-reported objective income and aggregate expenditures (LiTS3).

Figure A5: The difference between the deciles of the aggregate expenditure scale and the categories of the subjective economic status variable.

Exploring cross-country variation.

Table A7: Random Effects Meta-Regression Results with Knapp-Hartung Adjustment.

Figure A6: Meta-analysis of the association between subjective economic status and support for tax increases meant to finance social spending (based on LiTS2 data).

Table A8: Random-effects REML regression results predicting support for tax increases meant to finance social welfare.

Figure A7: The association between subjective economic status and support for tax increases meant to finance social spending—individual country models (LiTS3).

Replication with LiTS 3.

Table A9: Support for tax increases meant to finance social spending (healthcare, education, poverty assistance) with different operationalizations of objective welfare: the ECE scale (M1, M3, M5, M7) and self-reported income (M2, M4, M6, M8)—replication with LiTS3.

Table A10: The association between ideology, subjective economic status, and support for taxes (BES).

Questionnaires.

Table A11:Questionnaire (Life in Transition Survey).

Table A12:Questionnaire (British Election Study).

Notes

Author Biography

Laura Lungu is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg. Her work lies at the intersection of social psychology and political economy.

References

Alesina

Giuliano

(2011) Preferences for Redistribution. In: Benhabib

Bisin

Jackson

(eds) Handbook of Social Economics. Amsterdam: North-Holland, pp.93–131.

Anderson

Hildreth

JAD

Howland

(2015) Is the Desire for Status a Fundamental Human Motive? A Review of the Empirical Literature. Psychological Bulletin 141 (3): 574–601.

Arnold

(1990) The Logic of Congressional Action. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Banuri

Nguyen

(2023) Borrowing to Keep Up (with the Joneses): Inequality, Debt, and Conspicuous Consumption. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 206: 222–242.

Barnes

(2015) The Size and Shape of Government: Preferences Over Redistributive Tax Policy. Socio-economic Review 13 (1): 55–78.

Barr

(2020) The Economics of the Welfare State, 6th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bauhr

Charron

(2018) Why Support International Redistribution? Corruption and Public Support for Aid in the Eurozone. European Union Politics 19 (2): 233–254.

Beramendi

Rehm

(2016) Who Gives, Who Gains? Progressivity and Preferences. Comparative Political Studies 49 (4): 529–563.

Berens

Gelepithis

(2019) Welfare State Structure, Inequality, and Public Attitudes Towards Progressive Taxation. Socio-economic Review 17 (4): 823–850.

10.

Berisha

Meszaros

(2018) Household Debt, Consumption, and Income Inequality. International Economic Journal 32 (2): 161–176.

11.

Bobzien

(2020) Polarized Perceptions, Polarized Preferences? Understanding the Relationship between Inequality and Preferences for Redistribution. Journal of European Social Policy 30 (2): 206–224.

12.

Brown-Iannuzzi

Lundberg

Kay

, et al. (2015) Subjective Status Shapes Political Preferences. Psychological Science 26 (1): 15–26.

13.

Bunn

Perez Weigel

(2023) Sources of Government Revenue in the OECD. Washington, DC: Tax Foundation.

14.

Burgoon

Baute

Van Noort

(2023) Positional Deprivation and Support for Redistribution and Social Insurance in Europe. Comparative Political Studies 56 (5): 655–693.

15.

Busemeyer

Iversen

(2020) The Welfare State with Private Alternatives: The Transformation of Popular Support for Social Insurance. The Journal of Politics 82 (2): 671–686.

16.

Callan

Shead

Olson

(2011) Personal Relative Deprivation, Delay Discounting, and Gambling. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101 (5): 955–973.

17.

Cansunar

(2021) Who Is High Income, Anyway? Social Comparison, Subjective Group Identification, and Preferences Over Progressive Taxation. The Journal of Politics 83 (4): 1292–1306.

18.

Carr

Jayadev

(2015) Relative Income and Indebtedness: Evidence from Panel Data. Review of Income and Wealth 61 (4): 759–772.

19.

Cavaillé

Trump

(2015) The Two Facets of Social Policy Preferences. The Journal of Politics 77 (1): 146–160.

20.

Cinelli

Forney

Pearl

(2020) A Crash Course in Good and Bad Controls. SSRN Electronic Journal 53: 1071–1104.

21.

Coibion

Gorodnichenko

Kudlyak

, et al. (2020) Greater Inequality and Household Borrowing: New Evidence from Household Data. Journal of the European Economic Association 18 (6): 2922–2971.

22.

Cojocaru

(2014) Prospects of Upward Mobility and Preferences for Redistribution: Evidence from the Life in Transition Survey. European Journal of Political Economy 34: 300–314.

23.

Cojocaru

Diagne

(2015) How Reliable and Consistent Are Subjective Measures of Welfare in Europe and Central Asia? Economics of Transition 23 (1): 75–103.

24.

Condon

Wichowsky

(2020a) Inequality in the Social Mind: Social Comparison and Support for Redistribution. The Journal of Politics 82 (1): 149–161.

25.

Condon

Wichowsky

(2020b) The Economic Other: Inequality in the American Political Imagination. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

26.

Corneo

Grüner

(2000) Social Limits to Redistribution. The American Economic Review 90 (5): 1491–1507.

27.

Dimick

Rueda

Stegmueller

(2017) The Altruistic Rich? Inequality and Other-Regarding Preferences for Redistribution. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 11 (4): 385–439.

28.

Easterlin

(2003) Explaining Happiness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100 (19): 11176–11183.

29.

Engelhardt

Wagener

(2018) What Do Germans Think and Know about Income Inequality? A Survey Experiment. Socio-Economic Review 16 (4): 743–767.

30.

Evans

Pickup

(2010) Reversing the Causal Arrow: The Political Conditioning of Economic Perceptions in the 2000–2004 U.S. Presidential Election Cycle. The Journal of Politics 72 (4): 1236–1251.

31.

Faricy

Ellis

(2014) Public Attitudes toward Social Spending in the United States: The Differences between Direct Spending and Tax Expenditures. Political Behavior 36 (1): 53–76.

32.

Fennis

(2008) Branded into Submission: Brand Attributes and Hierarchization Behavior in Same-Sex and Mixed-Sex Dyads. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 38 (8): 1993–2009.

33.

García-Castro

García-Sánchez

Montoya-Lozano

, et al. (2022) The Perception of Economic Inequality in Everyday Life: My Friends with the Most and Least Money. Asian Journal of Social Psychology 25 (1): 20–34.

34.

Garritzmann

Neimanns

Busemeyer

(2023) Public Opinion Towards Welfare State Reform: The Role of Political Trust and Government Satisfaction. European Journal of Political Research 62 (1): 197–220.

35.

Gelman

(2008) Scaling Regression Inputs by Dividing by Two Standard Deviations. Statistics in Medicine 27 (15): 2865–2873.

36.

Gimpelson

Treisman

(2018) Misperceiving Inequality. Economics & Politics 30 (1): 27–54.

37.

Hansen

(2023) Greed, Envy, and Admiration: The Distinct Nature of Public Opinion about Redistribution from the Rich. American Political Science Review 117 (1): 217–234.

38.

Häusermann

(2018) The Multidimensional Politics of Social Investment in Conservative Welfare Regimes: Family Policy Reform between Social Transfers and Social Investment. Journal of European Public Policy 25 (6): 862–877.

39.

Häusermann

Kurer

Traber

(2019) The Politics of Trade-Offs: Studying the Dynamics of Welfare State Reform with Conjoint Experiments. Comparative Political Studies 52 (7): 1059–1095.

40.

Jacobs

(2016) Policy Making for the Long Term in Advanced Democracies. Annual Review of Political Science 19 (1): 433–454.

41.

Jacobs

Matthews

(2012) Why Do Citizens Discount the Future? Public Opinion and the Timing of Policy Consequences. British Journal of Political Science 42 (4): 903–935.

42.

Jacques

Noël

(2018) The Case for Welfare State Universalism, or the Lasting Relevance of the Paradox of Redistribution. Journal of European Social Policy 28 (1): 70–85.

43.

Korpi

Palme

(1998) The Paradox of Redistribution and Strategies of Equality: Welfare State Institutions, Inequality, and Poverty in the Western Countries. American Sociological Review 63 (5): 661–687.

44.

Kraus

Park

Tan

(2017) Signs of Social Class: The Experience of Economic Inequality in Everyday Life. Perspectives on Psychological Science 12 (3): 422–435.

45.

Linssen

Van Kempen

Kraaykamp

(2011) Subjective Well-Being in Rural India: The Curse of Conspicuous Consumption. Social Indicators Research 101 (1): 57–72.

46.

Luttmer

(2005) Neighbors as Negatives: Relative Earnings and Well-Being. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 120 (3): 963–1002.

47.

Minkoff

Lyons

(2019) Living with Inequality: Neighborhood Income Diversity and Perceptions of the Income Gap. American Politics Research 47 (2): 329–361.

48.

Mishra

Son Hing

Lalumière

(2015) Inequality and Risk-Taking. Evolutionary Psychology 13 (3): 1–11.

49.

Nelissen

Meijers

(2011) Social Benefits of Luxury Brands as Costly Signals of Wealth and Status. Evolution and Human Behavior 32 (5): 343–355.

50.

Newman

Johnston

Lown

(2015a) False Consciousness or Class Awareness? Local Income Inequality, Personal Economic Position, and Belief in American Meritocracy. American Journal of Political Science 59 (2): 326–340.

51.

Payne

Brown-Iannuzzi

Hannay

(2017) Economic Inequality Increases Risk Taking. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114 (18): 4643–4648.

52.

Perez-Truglia

(2013) A Test of the Conspicuous Consumption Model Using Subjective Well-Being Data. The Journal of Socio-Economics 45: 146–154.

53.

Piff

Kraus

Keltner

(2018) Unpacking the Inequality Paradox: The Psychological Roots of Inequality and Social Class. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 57: 53–124.

54.

Rehm

(2009) Risks and Redistribution: An Individual-Level Analysis. Comparative Political Studies 42 (7): 855–881.

55.

Rehm

Hacker

Schlesinger

(2012) Insecure Alliances: Risk, Inequality, and Support for the Welfare State. American Political Science Review 106 (2): 386–406.

56.

Rekker

(2022) Political Polarization Over Factual Beliefs. In: Strömbäck

Wikforss

Glüer

, et al. (eds) Knowledge Resistance in High-Choice Information Environments. London: Routledge, pp.222–236.

57.

Roth

(2026) Inequality, Relative Deprivation and Financial Distress—Evidence from Swedish Register Data. Review of Economics and Statistics 108 (1): 16–29.

58.

Rucker

Galinsky

(2008) Desire to Acquire: Powerlessness and Compensatory Consumption. Journal of Consumer Research 35 (2): 257–267.

59.

Rueda

Stegmueller

(2019) Who Wants What? Redistribution Preferences in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

60.

Sands

De Kadt

(2020) Local Exposure to Inequality Raises Support of People of Low Wealth for Taxing the Wealthy. Nature 586 (7828): 257–261.

61.

Shayo

(2009) A Model of Social Identity with an Application to Political Economy: Nation, Class, and Redistribution. American Political Science Review 103 (2): 147–174.

62.

Sivanathan

Pettit

(2010) Protecting the Self through Consumption: Status Goods as Affirmational Commodities. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (3): 564–570.

63.

Thal

(2020) The Desire for Social Status and Economic Conservatism among Affluent Americans. American Political Science Review 114 (2): 426–442.

64.

Watson

Clark

Chmielewski

, et al. (2013) The Value of Suppressor Effects in Explicating the Construct Validity of Symptom Measures. Psychological Assessment 25 (3): 929–941.

65.

Winkelmann

(2012) Conspicuous Consumption and Satisfaction. Journal of Economic Psychology 33 (1): 183–191.

66.

Zaidi

Alam

Mitra

(2009) Satisfaction with Life and Service Delivery in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: Some Insights from the 2006 Life in Transition Survey. World Bank Working Papers. Washington, DC: The World Bank.