Startle Response, Egalitarian Beliefs, and Distributive Preferences

Individuals differ in how easily they are startled. Some individuals are made to jump at loud noises or surprising images. Others remain calm, exhibiting little reaction. Underlying variation in fear-initiated startle responses are individual differences in disposition to fear, a trait influenced both by environmental conditions and genetics. The extent to which individuals are easily startled and the degree to which they exhibit fearfulness are both stable (Hatemi et al., 2013; Kendler, Myers and Prescott, 2002). Fearfulness and startle responses matter for politics. Using American data, a consensus seems to be mounting among political scientists that individuals with a high disposition to fear and large startle responses are more likely to adopt conservative views (Jost et al., 2003; Oxley et al., 2008; Jost and Amodio, 2012). In particular, socially phobic in- dividuals are much more likely to hold conservative views on out-group issues, such as immigration and segregation (Hatemi et al., 2013). However, it remains an open question whether fearfulness in general and startle response in particular underlies different economic preferences, and whether the general link between these traits and policy preferences extends outside of the Untied States. In this paper, we advance our understanding of the relationship between startle response and political preferences in two ways. First, we present results from five countries with similar liberal welfare states (Esping-Andersen, 1990) which nonetheless exhibit variance on relevant dimensions: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Second, we recover subjects economic preferences, namely their beliefs about egalitarianism and their distributive preferences. We show that the link between startle response and redistributive preferences is stronger in countries in which there is a greater degree of ideological disagreement between parties and a greater mean party position in favour of redistribution.