IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0085293.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Noblesse Oblige? Social Status and Economic Inequality Maintenance among Politicians

Author

Listed:
  • Michael W Kraus
  • Bennett Callaghan

Abstract

Economic inequality is at historically high levels in the United States and is among the most pressing issues facing society. And yet, predicting the behavior of politicians with respect to their support of economic inequality remains a significant challenge. Given that high status individuals tend to conceive of the current structure of society as fair and just, we expected that high status members of the U.S. House of Representatives would be more likely to support economic inequality in their legislative behavior than would their low status counterparts. Results supported this prediction particularly among Democratic members of Congress: Whereas Republicans tended to support legislation increasing economic inequality regardless of their social status, the social status of Democrats – measured in terms of average wealth, race, or gender – was a significant predictor of support for economic inequality. Policy implications of the observed relationship between social status and support for economic inequality are considered.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael W Kraus & Bennett Callaghan, 2014. "Noblesse Oblige? Social Status and Economic Inequality Maintenance among Politicians," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(1), pages 1-6, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0085293
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0085293
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0085293
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0085293&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0085293?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Moody, James & Mucha, Peter J., 2013. "Portrait of Political Party Polarization – ERRATUM," Network Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 1(2), pages 251-251, August.
    2. Moody, James & Mucha, Peter J., 2013. "Portrait of Political Party Polarization1," Network Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 1(1), pages 119-121, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Martin Korndörfer & Boris Egloff & Stefan C. Schmukle, 2015. "A Large Scale Test of the Effect of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior," SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research 808, DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).
    2. Yuxiao Dong & Jie Tang & Nitesh V Chawla & Tiancheng Lou & Yang Yang & Bai Wang, 2015. "Inferring Social Status and Rich Club Effects in Enterprise Communication Networks," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(3), pages 1-14, March.
    3. Martin Korndörfer & Boris Egloff & Stefan C. Schmukle, 2015. "A Large Scale Test of the Effect of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior," Working Papers 1601, Gutenberg School of Management and Economics, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Natasha Kossovsky & Kathleen M. Carley, 2020. "The collapse of the second Yatsenyuk government: roll call vote and dynamic network analysis," Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, Springer, vol. 26(1), pages 123-143, March.
    2. Neal, Zachary & Domagalski, Rachel & Yan, Xiaoqin, 2020. "Party Control as a Context for Homophily in Collaborations among US House Representatives, 1981 -- 2015," OSF Preprints qwdxs, Center for Open Science.
    3. Sandipan Roy & Yves Atchadé & George Michailidis, 2017. "Change point estimation in high dimensional Markov random-field models," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 79(4), pages 1187-1206, September.
    4. Huremović, Kenan & Ozkes, Ali I., 2022. "Polarization in networks: Identification–alienation framework," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 102(C).
    5. Lee, Jihui & Li, Gen & Wilson, James D., 2020. "Varying-coefficient models for dynamic networks," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 152(C).
    6. Baber, Hasnan, 2020. "Intentions to participate in political crowdfunding- from the perspective of civic voluntarism model and theory of planned behavior," Technology in Society, Elsevier, vol. 63(C).
    7. Ronald Heijmans & Richard Heuver & Clement Levallois & Iman van Lelyveld, 2014. "Dynamic visualization of large transaction networks: the daily Dutch overnight money market," DNB Working Papers 418, Netherlands Central Bank, Research Department.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0085293. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.