Meritocratic Preferences among Legislators

• In Event: Experiments with Political Elites

Abstract

If and how individuals and societies respond to economic inequality presents a central concern for contemporary political economy. Research on citizens shows that normative views on what constitutes a fair distribution of economic outcomes affect how individuals perceive inequality and to what extent they support redistribution. Our study employs an experimental game to investigate politicians’ fairness preferences concerning inequality caused by merit or luck. Because politicians are under public scrutiny, we expect that they adapt their fairness preferences when their choice is transparent. As a yardstick, we compare the sensitivity to choice transparency between politicians and citizens. Among legislators from five advanced democracies, some commonalities and differences between citizens and politicians are apparent. Politicians across the political spectrum show the same pattern as citizens; they redistribute more when inequality is due to luck than when it is due to merit. At the same time, politicians from the left and the right are more polarized in their fairness preferences than the respective citizens. In genera, choice transparency, on average, decreases redistribution only by a small amount. However, politicians of the right decrease redistribution substantially when inequality is due to luck and their choice is public. This finding suggests that politicians from conservative parties thus take possible negative reactions of (unfairly) privileged voters into account when deciding on redistribution.

Authors

• Maj-Britt Sterba, University of Konstanz

• Christian Breunig, University of Konstanz