Positional Deprivation and Support for Redistribution and Social Insurance in Europe
DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140221115168 |
Published date | 01 April 2023 |
Date | 01 April 2023 |
Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Comparative Political Studies
2023, Vol. 56(5) 655–693
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00104140221115168
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Positional Deprivation
and Support for
Redistribution and Social
Insurance in Europe
Brian Burgoon
1
, Sharon Baute
2
, and Sam van Noort
3
Abstract
We argue that support for redistribution increases when one experiences
“positional deprivation,”situations when one’s own income increases slower or
decreases faster compared to that of others. This specific combination of
economic suffering over-time and relative to others has effects beyond well-studied
measures of suffering that are static and/or absolute in nature, such as income
level. We empirically explore this hypothesis by using “objective-material”
measures of positional deprivation derived from the Luxembourg Income Studies
and the European Social Survey, and by using “subjective”measures derived from
an original survey in 13 European countries. We find that those whose income
growth is outpaced by the average and/or richest members of their country are
more likely to support redistribution. We also find that the objective and
subjective measures of positional deprivation are significantly correlated, and that
positional deprivation’s fostering of support for redistribution holds above-and-
beyond static and/or absolute measures of economic experience.
Keywords
European politics, political economy, public opinion, redistribution, social
welfare programs
1
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
2
University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany
3
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
Corresponding Author:
Brian Burgoon, Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe
Achtergracht 166, Amsterdam 1018 WV, Netherlands.
Email: b.m.burgoon@uva.nl
Introduction
We know from centuries of study of political economy that individuals’
economic misfortune or vulnerability can be fundamental to political support
for policies regulating economic distribution and social security. In consid-
ering such economic positions, existing scholarship has tended to emphasize a
person’s misfortune in terms that are substantively stronger than, the effects of
more familiar (static) (at a given moment in time) and absolute (relative to
one’s own position, not that of others). Occasionally, such studies might also
investigate either dynamic (over-time) or relative (between-group) misfor-
tune. However, virtually all scholarship neglects the specific combination of
dynamic and relative position—for instance, where one’s own income in-
creases less rapidly, or declines more steeply,than does the income of others in
one’s own society. Neglecting this combination is a problem for our un-
derstanding of the politics of social policymaking because in many countries
the most defining structural economic change of the last few decades has
exactly been that the income of some socio-economic groups has increased
much faster than that of other groups (Lakner & Milanovic, 2016;Nolan &
Weisstanner, 2022;Piketty et al., 2018; cf. Iversen & Soskice, 2019).
In this article, we focus on precisely this combination of over-time and
relative position, by exploring how attitudes towards welfare state redistri-
bution might be influenced by what we call “positional deprivation,”the
extent to which an individual’s growth in income is outpaced by the income
growth of others in one’s own country. We argue that positional deprivation
can be expected to play a distinct role in awakening insecurities and concerns
about economic misfortune or status loss, which ultimately strongly spurs the
demand for policies to redress inequalities. We argue that this effect occurs net
of commonly studied static and/or absolute measures of economic position.
We develop and empirically test three hypotheses regarding the effect of
positional deprivation on redistribution preferences. First, we argue that there
are good reasons to expect that an individual’s positional deprivation relative
to the average income growth in his/her country has substantial implications
for redistributive preferences. Second, we hypothesize that positional dep-
rivation relative to the wealthiest or the poorest ends of one’s country’s income
distribution has distinct implications for redistribution preferences: individ-
uals experiencing “upper-register positional deprivation,”where one’s income
growth is outpaced by that of the wealthiest in one’s country, should be more
supportive of redistribution than those experiencing “lower-register positional
deprivation,”where one’s income growth is outpaced by that of the poorest
households. Third, we conjecture that positional deprivation generally can be
expected to more strongly spur support for redistribution than for social
insurance, which consists of less-explicitly redistributive welfare state ser-
vices and risk insurance like unemployment and healthcare assistance.
656 Comparative Political Studies 56(5)
We empirically test these three novel hypotheses by combining two studies
of individual-level survey data. The first analysis focuses on real material,
“objective,”measures of positional deprivation applied to European Social
Survey (ESS) data on individual-level support for redistribution and social
policy in 23 European countries between 2002 and 2014. The ESS individual-
level income data is matched to measures of real disposable household income
from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) across household deciles in the
same countries for the period between 1997 and 2014. The resulting dataset
yields individual-level measures of positional deprivation based on 5-year
real, disposable income growth of a respondent’s own decile’s household,
subtracted from the growth experienced by other deciles in the respondent’s
country-year. Results show that respondents in a given country-year facing
higher average positional deprivation more strongly support government
redistribution than do those experiencing lower positional deprivation. The
ESS-LIS data also suggest that experiencing upper-register positional dep-
rivation (i.e., relative to the richest) makes respondents more likely to support
government redistribution than does lower-register positional deprivation
(i.e., relative to the poorest). Furthermore, ESS-LIS data provides modest
evidence that positional deprivation spurs support for redistribution more
strongly than support for unemployment protection, health services, childcare
services. These patterns corroborate our hypotheses and do so above-and-
beyond more commonly studied economic conditions like individual (static
and/or absolute) income or education.
The second empirical analysis focuses on an original survey, in 13 EU
countries, that allows us to focus on respondents’perceptions of their po-
sitional deprivation. The survey asks whether a respondent believes that his or
her own household income has declined more rapidly or increased less rapidly
than the growth experienced by the average household in his or her country.
We construe answers to this question as a measure of “subjective positional
deprivation.”Our analysis finds that such answers correlate significantly and
positively with LIS-based measures of objective positional deprivation sur-
mised from a respondent’s country-decile. Most importantly, the surveyed
measure of “subjective positional deprivation”also strongly positively cor-
relates with respondents’support for government redistribution, and less
strongly with support for unemployment assistance.
Taken together, the findings provide substantial evidence that both ob-
jective and subjective measures of positional deprivation, capturing the
combination of over-time and between-group economic suffering, increase
support for government redistribution in Europe. Moreover, the findings
suggest that such positional deprivation matters above-and-beyond traditional
measures of economic experience which capture the separate components of
over-time and/or relative economic wellbeing.
Burgoon et al. 657
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