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Commitment to Political Ideology is a Luxury Only Students Can Afford: A Distributive Justice Experiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2018

Simona Demel ,
Abigail Barr ,
Luis Miller  and
Paloma Ubeda
Simona Demel
Affiliation:
School of Biological Sciences, Queen's University Belfast, University Road, Belfast, BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland, UK, e-mail: simona.demel@gmail.com
Abigail Barr
Affiliation:
School of Economics, University of Nottingham, Room B44, Sir Clive Granger Building, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK, e-mail: Abigail.Barr@nottingham.ac.uk
Luis Miller
Affiliation:
School of Economics and Business, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Av. Lehendakari Aguirre 83 48015, Bilbao, Spain, e-mail: luismiguel.miller@ehu.eus
Paloma Ubeda
Affiliation:
Departamento de Economía Aplicada y Estadística, UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia), Madrid, Spain, e-mail: paloma.ubeda@cee.uned.es
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Abstract

Using a political-frame-free, lab-in-the-field experiment, we investigate the associations between employment status, self-reported political ideology, and preferences for redistribution. The experiment consists of a real-effort task, followed by a four-player dictator game. In one treatment, dictator game initial endowments depend on participants’ performance in the real-effort task, i.e., they are earned, in the other, they are randomly determined. We find that being employed or unemployed is associated with revealed redistributive preferences, while the political ideology of the employed and unemployed is not. In contrast, the revealed redistributive preferences of students are strongly associated with their political ideologies. The employed and right-leaning students redistribute earnings less than windfalls, the unemployed, and left-leaning students make no such distinction.

Keywords

Economic statuslab-in-the-field experimentsleft–right scaleredistribution
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , Spring 2019 , pp. 33 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2018 

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Footnotes

The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: doi:10.7910/DVN/OQFMB6. A. Barr acknowledges support from the Economic and Social Research Council via the Network for Integrated Behavioural Sciences (Award No. ES/K002201/1). L. Miller acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Grant ECO2015-67105-R) and the Basque Government (research group IT-783-13). The authors declare no conflicts of interest pertaining to the publication of this paper.

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