Perceptions of inequality

Perceptions of Inequality

This III research programme examines perceptions of inequality and distributions across many domains of life – including income, health, and education. The programme aims to contribute world-class empirical and methodological research on inequality preferences, attitudes, and perceptions, as well as their drivers.

Perceptions of the extent and causes of inequalities are vitally important to the functioning of societies, economies and politics. If the public thinks that inequalities are large and [...] unfair this can undermine faith in political and economic systems as a whole.

Benson, R., Duffy, B., Hesketh, R. and Hewlett, K. (2021), ‘Attitudes to inequalities’

The Programme is led by Professors Frank Cowell and Joan Costa-FontJakob Dirksen is the Programme’s Principal Researcher.

The programme focuses on research themes and questions that concern perceptions of, and attitudes towards, the diverse forms of inequality - such as income, health, and education. Members of the research programme are involved in the study of distributional values and preferences, including behavioural determinants that can explain differences in inequality preferences across societies and social groups.  

The programme’s research agenda includes applied empirical work to advance our understanding of perceptions of inequality and their potential explanations. This is based on indicators of individual attitudes and behaviours, such as interpersonal trust, social identity, ideology, poverty aversion, social cues, reference points, and the fear of being last.

The programme’s members study, for example, the sensitivity of perceptions and attitudes toward inequality to the presence or absence of absolute poverty and deprivation as well as socio-economic mobility – and who exactly is affected by these.

Moreover, of particular interest are well-documented, but less well-explained, gender differences in inequality aversion, including gender effects on risk perceptions and attitudes, trust and pro-social behaviours, locus of control, and time preferences, as well as other behavioural determinants (empathy, guilt, shame, etc). It is thereby also committed to an explicitly intersectional approach that considers additional self-identified reference groups.

The programme also makes methodological contributions that help compare and identify the best techniques to elicit individual and collective perceptions, preferences, and attitudes - spanning experimental methods from psychology, economics, and behavioural science, as well as the use of quantitative and qualitative surveys, and observational techniques from the social sciences.

Projects

Narratives of Inequality
Project team: Joan Costa-i-Font, Frank Cowell, Jakob Dirksen, Aaron Bermejo Quintero, Cecilia Saavedra 

This project examines global and country specific narratives of inequality. We focus on three key dimensions of inequality: income, wealth, and health, and zoom in on inequalities by gender. By tracking online search interest in terms related to inequality across different countries and scraping data from news articles, social media, and forums, we seek to better understand how inequality is perceived, discussed, and framed worldwide. Utilizing natural language processing (NLP), we identify dominant themes, assess sentiment variations, and compare regional differences in public discourse. We also examine patterns in global inequality discussions, such as those linked to macroeconomic performance and demographic composition, providing a data-driven perspective on evolving inequality narratives worldwide. 

Exposure, Information, and Circumstances - Survey Experimental Evidence on Perceptions of Inequality
More details to follow. 

Members

Professor Frank Cowell, Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, LSE

Professor Joan Costa-Font, Professor of Health Economics, Department of Health Policy, LSE 

Jakob Dirksen, Analysing and Challenging Inequalities Scholar, International Inequalities Institute, Department of Social Policy, and CASE/STICERD, LSE & Research and Policy Officer, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, Department of International Development, University of Oxford 

The research programme’s additional academic core members are:

Dr Miqdad Asaria, Assistant Professor, Department of Health Policy, LSE

Professor Conchita d’Ambrosio, Professor of Economics, Université du Luxembourg

Dr Tania Burchardt, Associate Professor, Department of Social Policy, Associate Director, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion and Deputy Director of STICERD, LSE

Dr Liema Davidovitz, Senior Lecturer, Ruppin Institute

Professor Koen Decancq, Professor, University of Antwerp and Research Fellow, CPNSS, LSE

Dr Matteo Galizzi, Associate Professor of Behavioural Science, Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, LSE

Dr H. Xavier Jara, Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, International Inequalities Institute

Professor Philippe Van Kerm, Professor of Social Inequality and Social Policy, Department of Social Sciences, University of Luxembourg 

Professor Nora Lustig, Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics and Director of the Commitment to Equity Institute, Tulane University

Professor Franoçis Maniquet, Professor of Economics, UC Louvain and Senior Research Scientist, Luxembourg Institute for Socio-Economic Research

Professor Javier Olivera, Professor of Economics, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Peru, National Bank of Belgium, and Luxembourg Institute for Socio-Economic Research

Dr Melissa Sands, Assistant Professor of Politics and Data Science, Department of Government, LSE

Professor Erik Schokkaert, Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Economics and Business, KU Leuven

Dr Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington, Associate Professor of Social Psychology, Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, LSE

Dr Denisa Sologon, Senior Research Scientist, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research

Dr Alain Trannoy, Research Director, EHESS, Aix-Marseille Université

PhD Affiliates:

Chloé de Meulenaer, PhD Student, Department of Economics, LSE

James Zuo, PhD Student, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Research Assistants:

Aaron Bermejo Quintero

Queena Chong

Hannah Heppner

Cecilia Saavedra 

Publications

Forthcoming Special Issues in the: Journal of Economic Inequality and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

Costa-Font, Joan and Cowell, Frank (2024) Specific egalitarianism? Inequality aversion across domains. III Working Paper (142). International Inequalities Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Chong, Queena, Costa-Font, Joan, Cowell, Frank and Dirksen, Jakob (2024) Did inequality shape the Brexit vote? LSE Inequalities,18 December. International Inequalities Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science. 

Events

Upcoming events

2nd Welfare & Policy Conference
Organised by the Society for Research on Welfare and Policy (WAP), and the Bordeaux School of Economics
5 May 2025, 1pm - 6 May 2025, 5pm. 

Featuring a thematic session on Perceptions of Inequality chaired by Professor Frank Cowell and Jakob Dirksen



International Research Workshop on Perceptions of Inequality
Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute 
Tuesday 20 May 2025, 9.00am - 5.45pm. Fawcett House, FAW 9.05. 

The Perceptions of Inequality Research Programme at the International Inequalities Institute at LSE is delighted to announce an in-person workshop on perceptions of inequality, taking place on 20 May 2025 at LSE

For further information on the workshop programme, see here

 


 Past events

Equality of Opportunity with Quadratic Social Welfare Functions
Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute

Wednesday 30 April 2025, 12.30 - 1.45pm. LSE Cheng Kin Ku Building, room 1.15.

Speaker: Michele Bernasconi

Derived from Epstein and Segal (1992), quadratic social welfare functions address classical criticisms to Harsanyi’s utilitarianism and incorporate concerns for ex ante fairness. The original axiomatization focuses on the social decision to allocate an indivisible good among equally deserving individuals. We show how the model extends naturally in an income distribution setting, where social preference seeks to account for equality in the distribution of opportunities between social types. Within this approach, we illustrate the interaction between aversions to inequality of outcomes and inequality of opportunities, and derive an overall index of inequality of outcomes and opportunities. A survey is proposed to test whether people’s social preferences are consistent with the axioms underlying the quadratic welfare representation.

 

The Political Consequences of Exposure to Inequality on Social Media: A Randomized Field Experiment
Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute
Wednesday 5 March 2025, 12.30 - 1.45pm. LSE Cheng Kin Ku Building, room 1.15. 

Speaker: Dr Melissa Sands, Assistant Professor of Politics and Data Science, Department of Government, LSE

People experience economic inequality through social media. Services like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, offer users a curated window into the lives of the wealthy. The effects of this digital exposure to inequality on political behaviour are not yet understood. To fill this gap we use a placebo-controlled field experiment that randomly assigns college students to follow the Instagram account of a fellow student enjoying a luxury Spring Break vacation. The experiment, conducted at both an elite private university and a non-elite public university, reveals limited effects of the treatment on students’ political attitudes and behaviours. Suggestive evidence emerges, however, of a suppressive effect: the treatment appears to reduce participants’ willingness to act in support of taxing large inheritances, mostly notably among students from historically-disenfranchised groups. While experiencing inequality online appears to have limited effects overall, it has the potential to suppress willingness to act in favour of redistribution.

 

Freedom counts: cross-country empirical evidence on the ranking of opportunity sets
III Inequalities Seminar Series
Tuesday 22 October 2024, 12:45pm – 1:45pm. In-person and online event. Marshall Building 1.09.

Speaker: Professor Erik Schokkaert, Professor Emeritus of Welfare and Health Economics, KULeuven

Using a novel survey-based research design, we investigate if people reveal that freedom has intrinsic value and we classify subjects according to the theoretical rules they implicitly employ to rank opportunity sets. We do this for a total of 4902 participants across 10 distinct countries. Opportunity sets in the survey consist of a number of hospitals with varying characteristics. Surprisingly, a majority of subjects reveal to attach intrinsic value to freedom, in that they prefer larger sets even if this may entail a loss of subjective welfare. We also find that a large majority of subjects use size-based rules to rank sets in terms of freedom, while there is considerable heterogeneity in the rules that subjects employ to rank sets in terms of welfare. These results are strikingly robust across countries.

Watch the recording. 

Inequality Decomposition with Machine Learning Methods 
III Seminar co-organised with the Opportunity, Mobility, and intergenerational Transmission of Wealth Research Programme
Thursday 28 March 2024  

Speaker: Emmanuel Flachaire, Professor Aix-Marseille Université, Faculté d'économie et de gestion (FEG) 

PhD & ECR Visiting Programme

The Perceptions of Inequality Research Programme at the International Inequalities Institute (III) of the London School of Economics and Political Science invites research students and early career researchers from other universities to spend up to one academic term at the School.

This visiting period aims to assist doctoral and post-doctoral researchers in their own research, granting them temporary access to the facilities and supervision offered by the III as well as establishing a network of academic contacts within the field of Inequality Studies.

The Perceptions of Inequality Research Programme is led by Professor Frank Cowell (Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Programme), Professor Joan Costa-i-Font (Professor of Health Economics and Co-Director of the Programme), and Jakob Dirksen (Analysing and Challenging Inequalities Scholar at the III and Principal Researcher of the Programme), and involves many academic core members with shared research interests and expertise around perceptions of inequality.

Prospective Visiting Researchers are asked to submit an email to j.t.dirksen@lse.ac.uk containing the following items:

1. CV.

2. Any relevant completion certificates or transcripts for undergraduate or graduate degrees previously obtained.

3. A brief statement of purpose for the research visit, not to exceed 1,200 words. This should include the topic of work to be undertaken while at the III and specify the period proposed for the visit (please take into account the LSE’s term dates).

4. Two academic reference letters.

5. A sample of written work (e.g. a publication, working paper, or thesis chapter).

6. Proposed dates of stay.

The PoI Programme members will regularly review submissions and may invite up to 2 candidates per academic term, depending on fit and availability.

Successful candidates may be eligible to receive up to £500 to cover travel costs and (where applicable) financial support to cover tuition fees.

Additional information for current PhD candidates:

For current PhD candidates, visiting the III is conditional on being accepted as Visiting Research Students by the Social Policy Department at LSE. Although the visiting programme at the Social Policy Department is a distinct process and we cannot guarantee that the selected candidate will be accepted by the Social Policy Department, the III will support the candidate’s application.

See this link for more details: https://www.lse.ac.uk/study-at-lse/graduate/vrs-social-policy.

Our Visiting PhD Grant may cover up to £2,500 per term. This amount will cover tuition fees for the hosting Department (100£ per week) and up to £500 to cover travel costs. Please contact j.t.dirksen@lse.ac.uk for further clarifications on the application process.

Upcoming Visits

Victoria Hünewaldt, Università degli Studi di Siena (co-hosted with the III Research Programme on Opportunity, Mobility and the Intergenerational Transmission of Wealth), early 2026.