The Effects of Wage Information on Support for Redistributive Spending

• Published date: 01 July 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X241254375
• Author: Emily Thorson,Kris-Stella Trump
• Date: 01 July 2024

Article

American Politics Research

2024, Vol. 52(4) 381–388

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X241254375

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The Effects of Wage Information on Support

for Redistributive Spending

Emily Thorson

1

and Kris-Stella Trump

2



Abstract

Public support for redistributive policies (e.g., Medicaid) depends in part on the perceived need and deservingness of ben-

ef‌iciaries. However, the average citizen is not well informed about the economic conditions of their fellow citizens. In this

article, we explore how information about average earnings of the working poor (a group generally seen as deserving) inf‌luences

support for redistributive spending. Two survey experiments test whether support for such spending is affected by information

about the average incomes of low-wage occupations (e.g., home health aides and retail sales workers). We additionally explore

potential mechanisms for this effect, including empathy. An exploratory study f‌inds an effect, but a pre-registered conf‌irmatory

study yields substantively small f‌indings with inconsistent signif‌icance. Even when participants both receive detailed information

about low-wage occupations’salaries and are encouraged to recall people who they know in those jobs, thetreatment has no

substantial effect. Given the strength of this treatment and the lack of consistent effects, we conclude that interventions

providing information about low-income salaries (e.g., in news coverage or interpersonal conversation) are unlikely to have a

substantive effect on support for redistribution.

Keywords

information effects, public opinion, support for redistribution, survey experiment

Introduction

Many Americans may be unaware of how many of their

fellow citizens, including people they know or interact with

regularly, are members of the working poor. The number of

people working full-time but barely getting by is at record

levels: seventy percent of enrollments in major public benef‌its

programs are from families with at least one full-time worker

(Accountability Off‌ice, 2020), and four of the f‌ive largest

occupations in the U.S. pay under $30,000 a year (Bureau of

Labor Statistics, 2021).

However, the public is generally not well informed when it

comes to economic statistics about incomes and inequality

(Gimpelson & Treisman, 2018;Pontusson et al., 2020), and it

is plausible that many Americans underestimate the preva-

lence of the working poor. In 2022, for example, the median

respondent to a YouGov poll guessed that the federal min-

imum wage was $9.88 per hour (it was $7.25 at the time), and

thought that it should be $14.88 per hour (Orth, 2022). A

similar pattern of over-estimation occurred for state minimum

wages, suggesting that over-estimation is not driven by local

cost of living differences.

In this paper, we evaluate whether information about low-

wage incomes can affect support for redistributive spending,

including spending specif‌ically targeted at the working poor.

We hypothesize that this type of information may be par-

ticularly likely to inf‌luence attitudes that are otherwise hard to

move with information experiments (Ciani et al., 2021),

because low-wage salaries in particular provide a relatable

and easily understood benchmark (Moniz, 2022) and because

the information pertains to a group who tend to be seen as the

“deserving poor”(Katz, 1989). To the best of our knowledge,

the effect of this information on support for redistributive

spending has not previously been studied.

We present the results of two experiments in which we test

this prediction. We f‌ind that, despite promising results in a

pre-test, a pre-registered and well-powered replication does

not yield substantively signif‌icant effects. We additionally

test three potential mechanisms for any potential effect,

asking whether effects may be enhanced by contrasting the

working poor with the rich, being made aware of one’s

misperceptions regarding the true incomes of the working

1

Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA

2

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

Corresponding Author:

Emily Thorson, Political Science, Syracuse University, 100 Eggers Hall,

Syracuse, NY 13244, USA.

Email: ethorson@gmail.com