Paying for resentment: positional competition, immigration and support for redistribution

Thesis

This thesis tackles the question of why the poor would be willing to pay the price of less redistribution in a context of ethno-cultural heterogeneity, even if they benefit from redistribution. I propose an argument whereby there is an extent to which people perceive differences in incomes between themselves and those poorer as justified, because they simultaneously reflect and confirm their own relative social status. Redistribution, as it compresses the income distribution, challenges this social ranking, heightens the acuteness of positional competition and consequently leads to feelings of resentment towards the people that make up the competition: those poorer than oneself. Resentment then leads to willingness to sacrifice parts of ones’ own material pay-offs to reduce those of the competition even more. This means that even people who are net beneficiaries of redistribution may become less supportive of it than their material calculation would predict. I also argue that people would be particularly willing to pay for resentment in a context of ethno-cultural heterogeneity due to immigration.

The implications of this theoretical mechanism are tested observationally with time-series cross-sectional survey data from 25 European countries between 2000 and 2019 from the ESS and the ISSP and causally by means of an online survey experiment conducted in 2018 in the UK. The results of the observational analysis suggest that support for redistribution among the poor was lower in country-years with larger recent increases in the share of foreign-born population. Moreover, this pattern is more pronounced when the share of pre-tax income of the bottom 50% was smaller. In the experiment, respondents were randomly allocated to either no vignette; information about their position in the income distribution relative to those poorer; information highlighting recent increases in immigration; or both of these two combined. The results suggest that exposure to the combined vignettes lead to lower expressed support for income redistribution.

Authors: de Romémont, J

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-eyookkq09
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: immigration; inequality; redistribution; status competition