Are Successful Citizens More Altruistic? The Effect of Citizens’ Feeling about Themselves on Self-Interested Political Attitudes

The labour market provides citizens with both financial and psychological resources, which likely influence their political attitudes. The literature on preferences for redistribution and their determinants has mainly considered the effect of economic resources. In this paper, we propose to integrate psychological factors derived from occupation, in particular self-fulfilment, to the study of support for the welfare state. We use comparative survey data from Europe (ESS 2012) to examine the extent to which self-fulfilment moderates the effect of the financial situation on preferences towards inequality reduction. Our analysis shows that among economically well-off citizens, the feeling of accomplishment reduces self-interested attitudes and fosters support for anti-poverty measures. The study has important implications for our understanding of mechanisms explaining altruistic attitudes.