Desert, responsibility, need and political convictions: The determinants of the willingness to redistribute

The paper investigates the attitudes of the German electorate towards redistribution and social justice using the method of conjoint analysis. In an online survey conduchted in fall 2016 in Germany, about 1000 respondents were confronted with different (randomly chosen) experimentally manipulated scenarios (vignettes) of small, hypothetical societies including four persons. In these societies, three persons differ with respect to income while the fourth person does not earn any money. We asked our respondents to distribute the total amount of income in each of those different hypothetical societies. The experimental manipulation of the vignettes was realized with regard to distribution of incomes and the way the income is created, whether through labor or as interest from a fortune, which again was either built by the income-receiver himself or inherited. In addition, we manipulated the vignettes about the life circumstances of the unemployed person (for example unemployed and searching for a job or unemployed as consequence of a blow of fate). The survey also comprised questions about values, political ideologies, and the respondents’ opinions to policies concerning taxation and redistribution measures. Our contribution to the literature is two-fold: First, this design enables us to investigate the influence of justice-relevant concepts such as desert, need, responsibility etc. on the respondents’ willingness to redistribute income from the haves to the have-nots. Second, our approach refines choice basesd conjoint designs because we asked the respondents to redistribute money instead of choosing between two or more different vignettes.