Fair Enough?
Support for Redistribution in the Age of Inequality

Analyzes why rising inequality does not translate into mass support for redistributive social policies.

Charlotte Cavaillé (Author)

9781009366045, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 30 September 2023

300 pages
27 x 18 x 2 cm, 0.505 kg

Fair Enough? proposes and tests a new framework for studying attitudes toward redistributive social policies. These attitudes, the book argues, are shaped by at least two motives. First, people support policies that increase their own expected income. Second, they support policies that move the status quo closer to what is prescribed by shared norms of fairness. In most circumstances, saying the “fair thing” is easier than reasoning according to one's pocketbook. But there are important exceptions: when policies have large and certain pocketbook consequences, people take the self-interested position instead of the 'fair' one. Fair Enough? builds on this simple framework to explain puzzling attitudinal trends in post-industrial democracies including a decline in support for redistribution in Great Britain, the erosion of social solidarity in France, and a declining correlation between income and support for redistribution in the United States.

1. Demand for redistribution in the age of inequality
I. Demand for redistribution: A conceptual framework: 2. What is fair
3. Unpacking demand for redistribution
4. As if self-interested? The correlates of fairness beliefs
5. When material self-interest trumps fairness reasoning
II. Changes in demand for redistribution: 6. Explaining stability and change
7. Fiscal stress and the erosion of social solidarity
8. Partisan dynamics and mass attitudinal change
9. How proportionality beliefs form
10. The nature and origins of reciprocity beliefs
Conclusion
Index.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB]