Seeing the rich makes people favour redistribution, but also increases political division

People are more likely to support wealth-redistribution policies when they can clearly see how rich others are. However this greater visibility of wealth also increases dissatisfaction and political polarisation, according to new research published in PNAS Nexus.

Dr Milena Tsvetkova, Associate Professor of Computational Social Science in the Department of Methodology was part of a team of three co-authors whose study showed that the structure of people’s social networks strongly influences how they perceive inequality and how they vote on redistribution. In everyday life most individuals interact with people whose income and circumstances resemble their own, creating blind spots. When people do not directly observe large differences in wealth, they tend to underestimate inequality, feel more content with their situation, and show less interest in policy change.

The research team combined a computational model with an online experiment involving 1,440 US participants who were randomly assigned as rich or poor and asked to vote repeatedly on tax rates. This design reproduced the selective visibility created by real social networks where friendships, professional contacts and online activity shape how accurately they judge the wider distribution of wealth.

Networks that were highly segregated by wealth produced the lowest support for redistribution and the lowest levels of polarisation. Poor participants remained the poorest group but often reported feeling relatively satisfied because they did not see the far higher scores of the wealthy. In contrast, networks that allowed poor participants to see many rich individuals generated higher voting support for taxation and reduced inequality, but also produced more dissatisfaction and more division between groups.

Dr Milena Tsvetkova said: “We wanted to understand how social information we obtain from our social contacts and media exposure biases our understanding of inequality in society and our preferences for redistribution. We found that when participants are segregated by wealth, they vote for lower taxation, so inequality persists but participants are happy about it, remaining blissfully ignorant. In contrast, when the wealthy are more visible, inequality decreases because the poor, who are a majority in the experiment, vote for a higher taxation rate; yet, the poor are unhappy about it because comparison is the thief of joy. Our research suggests that, as a society, we may be able to increase support for redistribution by exposing the ultra-rich, but paradoxically, the resulting lower inequality may be accompanied by increased dissatisfaction and disagreement. Opinion leaders and policy makers should try and mitigate the trade-off.”

The findings highlight a difficult balance for governments, campaigners and communicators as greater awareness of economic extremes may be necessary to build support for redistribution policies. Yet making inequality more visible also carries the risk of deepening feelings of unfairness and intensifying political conflict.

Read the full report here.