My dissertation "Inequality, Context, and Prosocial Behavior: An Examination of Redistributive Preferences" contributes to an emergent literature on the effects of inequality on policy outcomes by illuminating the psychological and institutional factors which influence support for redistributive policies differentially among the rich and poor. In my dissertation, I advance two primary arguments. First, drawing from the evolutionary psychological literature on competition effects and the social psychological literature on the social cognition of status, I argue that at the individual-level, economic threat moderates the relationship between social status and prosocial behavior. Secondly, drawing from the resource model of political participation and models of policy responsiveness, I argue that at the institutional-level, transparency interventions fail to promote redistribution to lower-income citizens specifically when (1) lower-income citizens do not access the information released by transparency interventions and when (2) lower-income citizens do not turn out to vote at rates comparable to higher-income citizens.;I evaluate my first argument using both a laboratory experiment and public opinion data from the 2012 American National Election Study (ANES). In contrast to theoretical expectations, in the laboratory experiment I present evidence that under conditions of economic threat, low and high-status subjects behave similarly: they are equally likely to perceive threat and give roughly equal amounts to one another in a dictator game. Using data from the 2012 ANES, I present evidence that while income does not predict whether an individual is more likely to blame low-status consumers or high-status Wall Street bankers as being more responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, I do present evidence which suggests that high-income individuals who blame higher-status groups more than lower-status groups are significantly more likely to support increased aid to the poor.;I evaluate my second argument empirically with a laboratory experiment and state-level panel data covering the years 1978-2000. Using a laboratory experiment, I present evidence that under conditions of budget transparency, subjects endowed with the power to create budgets were more likely to allocate greater proportions of their budget to subjects who had more resources and who had the power to veto the budget. Using state-level panel data between 1978-2000, I explore the relationship between transparency, media market penetration, class bias in voter participation, and welfare expenditures in the United States. Using a series of between-within panel models, I present evidence that the effect of transparency on public welfare expenditures is conditional on the different turnout propensities of the rich and the poor: in states where wealthier citizens are significantly more likely to vote in elections than the poor, longitudinal increases in budget transparency over time are associated with significant reductions in state welfare effort.;The results of my dissertation have produced important insights into the psychological and institutional mechanisms that influence the redistributive preferences of individuals and the redistributive behavior of states. My research can move the fields of political science and social psychology toward resolution of unsettled theoretical debates concerning the generosity of different social classes and from a prescriptive standpoint reinforces the need for transparency interventions to move beyond a singular focus on information-release.
展开▼
