Positional Deprivation and Support for Redistribution and Social Insurance in Europe

• Author: Brian Burgoon,Sharon Baute,Sam van Noort
• 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