Redistribution Preference Analysis
Redistribution preference analysis examines why individuals support or oppose government efforts to reduce inequality. The self-interest baseline comes from Meltzer and Richard's 1981 model, in which the demand for redistribution falls with one's own income because the rich pay more and receive less from transfers. Benabou and Ok's 2001 POUM (prospect of upward mobility) hypothesis adds a forward-looking twist: people who expect to climb the income ladder may oppose redistribution even when currently poor, because they anticipate being net payers tomorrow. A third strand emphasizes beliefs about fairness — whether success reflects effort or luck. The empirical method is an individual-level survey regression, typically ordered logit or multilevel, of redistribution attitudes on income, mobility expectations, beliefs, and contextual factors.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Meltzer, A. H., & Richard, S. F. (1981). A Rational Theory of the Size of Government. Journal of Political Economy, 89(5), 914-927. · DOI 10.1086/261013
- Benabou, R., & Ok, E. A. (2001). Social Mobility and the Demand for Redistribution: The POUM Hypothesis. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 116(2), 447-487. · DOI 10.1162/00335530151144078
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.