Income Inequality, Equal Opportunity, and Attitudes About Redistribution

type="main"> This article explores how income inequality and social mobility affect attitudes about redistribution in global perspective. Individual-level data on over 50,000 individuals from 38 countries in the International Social Survey Programme are combined with country-level data from the World Bank, Standardized Income Inequality Database, and the Economic Freedom of the World data. OLS regression models with robust, clustered standard errors are estimated to account for the presence of unobserved, country-level effects in the error terms. Social mobility is found to be a more important predictor of preferences for redistribution than income inequality. Specifically, those who live in countries with greater social mobility are more supportive of redistribution while individuals who have experienced upward mobility themselves are less supportive, although an upwardly mobile individual in a more mobile society is more supportive of redistribution than an upwardly mobile individual in a less mobile society. The central finding of this study is that the tangibility of redistributive social policies may bolster support for social spending. The structures and institutions that facilitate upward mobility—and potentially attenuate some of the detrimental effects of income inequality—are generally the products of more comprehensive redistribution policies, and public opinion may reflect this.