Stylized Facts about Attitudes toward Inequality: A Contrast between Income and Wealth

While attitudes towards income inequality have been widely studied, far less is known about attitudes towards wealth inequality. This paper investigates who evaluates wealth inequality as unfair and how far this differs from established patterns regarding attitudes towards income inequality. Based on a systematic literature review, we identify five stylized facts about the individual- and context-level determinants of attitudes towards income inequality. In line with these, we find that political orientation and perceptions of social mobility are strongly related to fairness attitudes towards wealth inequality using data from the European Social Survey. In contrast, individuals’ social class, occupation, income, and education do not seem to play a role. We further find substantial cross-national variation in attitudes towards wealth inequality similar to prior work: citizens of family-oriented countries are the most likely to view wealth inequality as unfairly large, whereas citizens of social-democratic countries show the lowest concern. Still, an overwhelming majority perceives wealth inequality as unfairly large across most European countries, suggesting that prevalent distributions of wealth are seen to violate principles of fairness.