“Que Le Chinguen Más”: Why Do People Support Redistributive Policies in México?

Support of people to the redistributive policies in a country it’s an important issue to analyze the reproduction of inequality and the legitimacy of distributive justice. There are different explanations about factors related to support for redistributive justice.

At the beginning, some related factors were observed levels of economic inequality, poverty and social mobility. Then, other subjective factors such as subjective social class and bias in the perception of economic inequality and social mobility were integrated. In general, these new explanations relate representations of distributive justice to support to redistributive justice.

Although research on this topic at the global level has grown in recent years, few studies have focused on Latin America, due to the low availability of data.

In this research, I analyze the factors that support redistributive policies in Mexico, taking data from the National Poverty Survey of Mexico in 2015, and complemented with information obtained in interviews conducted in Mexico City.

In addition to confirming explanations of other countries on related factors such as social class, perception of inequality and representations of poverty, in this analysis I find new factors related such as the neighborhood of residence and the daily mobility routes of the people, because of its high relation with the subject's perception of economic inequality.

I find also important to highlight how support for redistributive policies changes according to what type of social policy is, particularly if it’s universalistic or focused one.