Preliminary and Incomplete Redistributive Politics with Target-specific Beliefs

There is perennial tension between the generosity of means-tested transfers and the work efforts of recipients. Individual support for these policies is associated with beliefs about whether the poor are lazy or industrious. At the same time, support for general redistribution from the rich to the poor is viewed in terms of general beliefs that luck rather than effort determines income (or mobility). This paper takes a first step toward unifying these literatures by incorporating target-specific beliefs about the rich and the poor into a model that broadly follows key insights from the literature on general beliefs and preferences for redistribution. We develop and test a theory about support for redistribution in the presence of targetspecific beliefs about the causes of low and high incomes. Our theory predicts that target-specific beliefs about the poor matter most for preferences about transfers to the poor, and target-specific beliefs about the rich matter most for preferences about taxation of the rich. Survey evidence from the United States and from Germany, the latter using survey questions we wrote for a module of the German SocioEconomic Panel, confirms this. We find that 42% of Americans give different answers when asked, respectively, about the reasons for being rich and the reasons for being poor. Experimental evidence on giving money to real welfare recipients provides additional support for our theory. JEL Codes: D63; D72; H21; H24