Institutional Trust and Support for Redistribution: The Views of the Wealthy and of the General Population in Brazil

Comparing and understanding the attitudes of the wealthiest toward inequality, their level of trust in the State, and how these factors influence their support for redistributive policies is crucial to understand the dynamics of inequality and garner support for redistribution. Our paper examines variations in these attitudes across different sociodemograph:ic segments in Brazil and addresses key gaps in the literature. Specifically, we focus on the top income earners in comparison to other population groups, based on a unique dataset, with an oversampling of the top 5% of the wealthiest. To investigate trust in the State, we assess various levels of trust across different state institutions and agents of government (bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the police), to examine how these trust levels relate to redistribution preferences. Additionally, we employ measures of redistributive preferences that account for perceived costs, diverging from the "free lunch" assumptions commonly found in the literature. This allows us to explore how trust in state institutions affects the relationship between wealth and support for redistribution. Our findings indicate that economic self-interest significantly drives the wealthy's opposition to redistribution, despite their acute awareness of inequality. Moreover, distrust in the State agent's capacity to effectively redistribute wealth emerges as a critical factor shaping their preferences, underscoring the crucial role of trust in explaining the legitimacy of redistributive policies. We discuss some theoretical implications of our empirical findings, emphasizing the role of perceptions on inequality, on how the State works, and ideological orientations toward wealth.