Wealth and Preferences for Redistribution

How does wealth affect policy preferences? While the wealthy have been shown to have disproportionate influence in shaping policies in many societies, we know little about how wealth itself shapes policy preferences. Although wealth provides a range of important social and economic advantages above and beyond those of income, including political influence, and inequalities in wealth are even more extreme in many societies than those of income, social scientists have largely neglected wealth in studies of stratification and inequality. In this study, the relationship between wealth and support for redistributive social policies is examined in cross-national perspective using data on 31 countries from the 2009 wave of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), the first wave of that study to include measures of wealth. We present and argue for an alternative to a convention in quantitative cross-national research of pooling multiple country-level surveys into a single regression model, and introduce an alternative approach that blends the quantitative meta-analysis of country-level regressions with a more qualitative comparative-historical analytical approach. The findings presented herein demonstrate that wealth is among the most important determinants of policy preferences.