In my last post, I questioned Thomas Edsall's claim that "study after study shows that as the gulf between rich and poor widens, voters become increasingly mean spirited and hostile to the welfare state, progressive taxation and regulations designed to protect consumers, workers and the environment." The gulf between the rich and poor has widened substantially since the mid-1970s in the United States, but for the questions I looked at, opinions have either become more liberal or stayed about the same.
There are strong reasons for expecting the demand for redistribution to increase as inequality increases. One is self-interest--people will gain more from redistribution when the rich have more to redistribute. The other is a sense of fairness--the bigger the gap between the actual distribution and what people think is a fair distribution, the more demand to do something about it. The studies that Edsall cited point to effects going in the other direction--ways in which growing inequality might reduce support for redistribution. For the most general one (and the only one to mention taking from the rich), there is no trend, suggesting that the effects in different directions pretty much balance out. But it doesn't seem that people have become more mean-spirited towards the disadvantaged: support for the welfare state has increased, not declined.
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